On August 19th and 20th I attended the St. Louis Railroad Prototype Modeler’s Meet, now hosted by Lonnie Bathurst and a team from the Gateway NMRA. It was a HUGE event–over 900 attendees, lots of models to see, and lots of great vendors. It is a must-do event for prototype modelers.

The event began on Thursday night with some layout tours and a social at the DoubleTree Hotel in Collinsville. I went to the social and it was a lot of fun. It was like a family reunion. I saw a ton of guys I knew and eventually I sat with Scott Thornton, Dennis Eggert, Clark Propst and Jason Klocke and had a few beers.

I got to the meet on Friday afternoon after work and the family reunion continued. Just about all I did was stop and talk to friends, and I only had time to visit a few vendors. I barely took any photos. I left at 1800 as they closed the event down for layout tours and evening events.

Below. Here are a few of the models I liked enough to photograph. The C&NW engine below was built by Chris Blazek; the prototypes are a favorite of mine. This model appeared in an issue of the C&NW Modeler a few years back and I was happy to meet Chris and see the model in person.

I was at the meet all day Saturday but I ended up hanging around the model display tables most of the afternoon with friends just talking about trains and life. I didn’t take much time to shop or visit vendors.

Below. Here’s my old buddy Rusty Evans. Rusty brought a huge model display and a tribute display to our mutual friend Bob Harpe. I must’ve sat and talked with Rusty for an hour.

Rusty specializes in caboose models, particularly Southern Railway cabooses. Here’s an example of Rusty’s good work below. It’s a shame it needs to be painted and finished because it’s beautiful just the way it is.

Dennis Eggert brought a huge model display and it was worth the cost of admission just to see it in person. Below. Here is Dennis’s portable version of Tower CK (C&NW-MILW) in Wisconsin. It is amazing. He’ll eventually incorporate this into his layout but for now it’s making the rounds at RPM events.

Below. Here are the Baby Trainmasters coming soon from Rapido. They are a few years past my modeling era but I see one in Milwaukee Road livery making guest appearances at Hermitage Road.

Below. Here’s Matt Herman, in the orange hat, busy taking over the world with his new venture 3D Central. Matt’s work is breath-taking and his website is https://3dcentraltrains.com/collections/ho-scale. he had a lot of new models on display at the meet. I’m a fan!

I also spent a good half an hour talking to my old friend Dough Forbes in the vendor area. Doug is a high school science teacher and a very interesting guy, a devoted dad and a great modeler. Doug produces 3D models of C&EI and Illinois Terminal prototypes, a few of which are seen below. These rare electric engines ran near my home in O’Fallon. Doug does the design, printing and finishing. Such good work deserves a lot more attention. Doug has a little website where you can see models for sale at https://forbes-train-models.square.site/.

Here are a few more interesting Doug Forbes 3D-printed models. I’ve visited the Pana, Illinois interlocking tower several times–that’s the model on the right. The other interlocking tower is a C&EI prototype.

I spent another hour at St. Louis RPM talking to my old friend Jim Canter. Jim, in the yellow shirt below, is the UN Ambassador of Proto48 Modeling and brought his traveling layout to the meet. Jim is just about the friendliest guys you will meet in the hobby. To quote another modeling friend, “Jim will give you the shirt off his back if you ask for it.” He has a great sense of humor and is a lot of fun to be around.

Jim was showing off a Sunset Models Third Rail SD-40-2 custom-painted for the original Nickel Plate lines. NKP never had any of these engines…until now. It is an incredible model.

Also of note was the Modutrak N Scale Layout–the full, complete layout–in the opposite corner of the RPM room. Mike Skibbe and Bill Denton are the key men here; they are both fine men and committed leaders in the hobby. This is one of the best N scale layouts you’ll see anywhere–portable or not.

Layout Visit

On Saturday evening after the meet was over, I had a few guys come over to see and run on my Hermitage Road layout.

Before the weekend I spent some time getting the layout ready for running. I fixed some wiring and got a few buildings closer to completion.

In particular I got some good work done on my grocery warehouse. I installed a deep awning built with braces from the Walthers Modulars kits and long pieces of Evergreen .060 styrene. The dock was similarly built, using a piece of Evergreen .060 styrene and then covered in HO scale 2 x 8 strip wood from Northeastern Scale Models. The deck supports were made of scale 4 x 4s, also from Northeastern. The tarpaper roof is cut from a piece of black construction paper secured with a children’s glue-stick, then painted with Tamiya water-based paint.

Motivation for my grocery warehouse is this photo, below, taken by Fenton Wells in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on the old Southern Railway in the 1970s. Fenton’s caption reads East side spur to the old grocery warehouse. I can’t find anything on the grocery warehouses near Hermitage Yard, but this prototype has all the good stuff I’m looking for–a 1920s-vintage brick building, a deep, covered loading dock, and small house on top for elevator machinery.

Below. A few days before the visit, my grocery warehouse has been significantly improved.

My Rosenegk brewery also got a few finishing touches, including roof details, a new tarpaper roof and weathering on the concrete foundation. I sprayed it with Testor’s Dullcote tinted with dark brown paint to blend everything together. It turned out a little more pink that I planned, but I wanted a contrast between the brown factories on either side…and I got it.

The brewery took a ling time to finish because I struggled getting mortar between the bricks. Here’s a close-up of the mortar detail. I used white spackling paste, thinned a little bit with water and spread on the model, and then painstakingly cleaned off with a moist rag. The spackling (mortar) got into most of the brick crevices, but not all of them, leaving some bad gaps. Elsewhere the mortar looks really good.

Below. I’ll cover the ongoing construction of the block company in a later post, but here’s what the structure looked like on Saturday evening during the visit. I had an overhead crane built over the second loading door–the door behind the box car with the pallets of blocks–for loading gondolas that broke the day before everybody came over. The crane was a nice model and talking point. Now it’s it a dozen pieces on the workbench.

Here’s the layout at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday night, cleaned up and ready for action.

Visitors included Todd Herman and two of his travel buddies, Scott Ruth and Linn Moedinger, along with Clark Propst and Jason Klocke, and Tom Christiansen, Greg Davis and Bill Middlemaas.

Clark and Jason and well-known in the RPM world and both gave clinics at this year’s St. Louis meet. Todd is standing on the left, uncoupling cars for Clark who is sitting with the throttle. Todd’s incredible L&NE layout can be seen at https://www.flickr.com/photos/77373135@N05/sets/72157660390159495/. It is one of my favorite layout sites and Todd’s work is second to none.

Tom, Greg and Bill are old buddies of mine–we frequently met up at the Savannah and Cocoa Beach RPM events. They’re great guys and outstanding modelers. We all got to drinking beer and talking and I didn’t take any more pictures except this one, below.

It was a good weekend, with the big RPM and the layout visit! – John