Thank you all for the warm welcome and kind words--very encouraging. There are many creative and talented modelers on this forum and I'm eager to gain from your experience.
Mario, regarding John Allen, I was twelve when I met him. I remember him as a pleasant, gracious host. My dad had called to make the appointment several days before and even though John didn't know us at all, he welcomed our whole family to his living room and then down into his basement. His house in Monterey was nice, clean and well-appointed, especially considering he was a life-long bachelor. He told us he planted his entire front yard in juniper because he didn't like yard work. As Jeff C noted above, John was a professional photographer and he apparently did pretty well on the commercial side. He said he had done a lot of work for the California-based oil companies, particularly Chevron and Union 76. I remember coming down the basement stairs and turning left, past his extensive workshop and then into G&D land. I had studied his work in Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman so extensively that I knew right where to find the Gorre station, the lumber mill at Sowbelly and the famous bridges at French Gulch. John gave a us brief history of the railroad, how it had grown from the tiny original Gorre & Daphetid branch to a larger layout in his former house (on Cannery Row) to the present complex basement layout. He had us choose an engine from the roundhouse, made up a train in the Great Divide yard, and ran it for us over the entire line at a slow, realistic speed. He was patient in answering questions about how he built certain scenic features and structures. At the time, the Andrews branch was still under construction and he showed us his hand-drawn plans for what he intended that section to look like. He had set up a sophisticated (for the early 1970s) lighting system that allowed him to go through an entire dawn-to-dusk cycle in about 90 minutes, and he ran that for us while we talked and gawked. We were there for about three hours and he was unfailingly pleasant the whole time. My dad, a Baptist pastor, noted that John used good language during the entire visit. Even 40 years later, I'm surprised how many of these details still stick with me. Mario, thanks for asking!
