PHOTOS BY BILL SCHAUMBURG
2014 Cocoa Beach RPM Meet Warm weather, warm friendships and good modeling/William C. Schaumburg W
hen 270 model railroaders from all corners of the U.S. and parts of Canada arrive at a hotel in Florida with carefully-packed boxes containing fine models of rail- road equipment and structures and it is early January, it can only mean one thing: it is time for the annual Proto- type Rails prototype modeling meet in Cocoa Beach, Florida. This year’s event was no exception to what has been happening for about a dozen years at the Cocoa Beach Hilton, an excellent venue for our type of meet- ing and one that usually offers a little ex- tra in the form of sand, sun and (usually) a nice deck to meet new and old friends. These last three attractions also encour-
The Florida East Coast Ry. is across the Indi- an River from Cocoa Beach, but is usually camera shy. The FEC Ntrak layout at Cocoa Beach helped fill the gap with on-line scenes rendered in N scale in a Free-mo manner. The FEC is a road of many colors, as SD70M-2 No. 107 and SD70 103 show (top). Chuck Davis models the Lehigh Valley in HO and brought his scale test car (see Sept. 2012 RMC) and a flat (Bowser) loaded with steel plates. From the days before nearly-solid trains of auto racks, Chuck showed how De- troit delivered autos in boxcars (left). This is a Proto 2000 auto box he rebuilt with opening ends and a load. It has a 4-41 built date and inside height of 10′-8″. Steel cars taller than 10′-0″ were not common until the mid-1950’s.
52 MARCH 2014
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