70’s Modeling Resources

lvrr.anthraciterailroads.org

Great details and color guides for locomotives & rolling stock for Lehigh Valley.  

Tom

I have a book called "America's New Railroads" that was published in 1980 and predominantly focuses on 1970's railroading in terms of successes and failures.  It is both a historical narrative as well as a photo history for people interested in that period.  It covers the failure of Penn Central while is lauds the successes of Chessie and Norfolk and Western.  It has a nice chapter on the Autotrain.

While I don't model this era myself, I find it quite intriguing.  I rode my first train in 1974 on the Southern Crescent when Amtrak Cars were intermixed with Southern cars prior to Southern finally giving up on passenger rail and grew up trackside on the New York & Long Branch commuter railroad that ran PC E8s and E7s with decrepit P70 coaches well past their service life next to CNJ coaches from the Blue Comet era and a long list of streamlined cars from many roads that were hastily stenciled with CNJ logos over their predecessor road names and fitted with 106 coach seats.

It was a fascinating period looking back as a child and how trains should look, but at the same time as an adult I can see what a wreck the NE passenger scene was.  My experience with freight prior to going to college during the late 80's was a pair of Conrail GP38s with one still in PC black doing the local run to Asbury Park, NJ to deliver paper to the local newspaper and the occasional cement train on the former CNJ Southern Division when I took the time to to walk the tracks 3 miles to the north of where I grew up.

It was a fascinating period for a railfan while a terrible period for the railroads that operated in bankruptcy.  Of course out west it was different as the ATSF and the UP didn't have issues with failure that I grew up with, but I still cherish memories of locomotives on their last legs doing their job every day to get work done.

Actually, some western railroads were having a rough time in the seventies.  The Rock Island was in big trouble. The Rock was running locomotives in a variety of paint schemes and continued to do so even before they adopted that blue and white “The Rock” paint scheme before shut-down.

The seventies were also when the Milwaukee Road shut off the juice on their Pacific extension prior to abandoning it.

if you were modeling the Burlington Northern, you could run locomotives painted in CB&Q, GN, NP and SP&S for the first couple of years after the merger.

Thank you all for the responses so far. I should have mentioned that my friend is modeling Canadian railroads, and he had wondered if US stock ever appeared on Canadian lines. I told him that I imagined that they did, especially (I assume) stock from lines in the NE and Upper Midwest, but others more knowledgeable than myself may be able to confirm or expand on that.

Thanks again,

Kyle

I’m certain that a lot of freight cars crossed the US:Canadian border back then. As a Texas resident, I couldn’t tell you which roads were the most likely to provide rolling stock, but yes, I’d say that they would.

Your friend might consider that certain US railroads like the Soo, the Grand Trunk Western, and the Central Vermont were subsidiaries of the CPR and the CN.