PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR The S scale Sierra Northern This layout will be on the NMRA Convention tour/Bob Hogan W 40


e generally don’t get “do- overs” in real life, but we can have that opportunity in the


world of model railroading. After 25 years of narrow gauge modeling in Sn3, I took the opportunity to do just that eight years ago with my final cor- porate move, this time to middle Geor- gia. With so many years devoted to narrow gauge modeling, with its focus on “rivet counting,” prototypical model- ing and painstaking recreation of accu- rate Colorado scenes and structures for the Rio Grande Southern and D&RGW,


I felt the need to try modeling some- thing different. The result was the Sierra Northern Railroad, a totally new S scale layout featuring the Southern Pacific Railroad on a semi- prototypical crossing of the Sierra Ne- vada. No attempt was made to model any specific location but rather to cap- ture the general look and feel of the Southern Pacific’s Donner Pass route (known to SP employees as “the Hill”) set in a time period between 1950 and 1956. This allowed me to operate the best of Espee’s mainline steam power


JUNE 2013


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