2010 March 10 - a few days later

During the past week I have continued to move and remove boxes of models, books etc from the back garage (layout room), and start to develop a more detailed plan, with sheets of linefow starting to appear around the walls. These contain doodles of track plans and or scenes I hope to incorporate into the layout.

Observant viewers will note that the title of this blog has changed after just a week. Originally it was "Pacific Feather and Eureka RR" the name of the large portable layout built by the PFE Group of Christchurch about ten years ago. Our claim to fame was that Tony Koester of Model Railroad Planning fame, drove the golden spike into the PFE layout at the 2000 NZ Association of Model Railway Clubs biennial convention. I was a member of that group and still go under the nickname of PFE92. No, there were not 90+ members in the group, only six or seven, but we all had a number based on a self assessment of our modelling strengths and weaknesses. My score ended up at 92 (out of about 140 - 150 if I can recall).
Unfortunately, a major rift between a couple of the members, and the inability to find suitable (CHEAP) storage for the many modules, meant that in 2002 the layout was split up and sections given away or scrapped altogether. A minor aside, in the Garden City Model Railway Club my membership number was "29", inverse of "92". Some of my older HO equipment is still labelled 29 or 029 on the base.

Therefore my new layouts name is the "Pacific Feather and Eastern Railroad" to reflect a change to the layout's history. In an "altered history" environment the PFE RR took over the Western Pacific mainline (Oakland CA to Salt Lake City UT) in the late 1970s, instead of the Union Pacific Railroad merging Western Pacific into it's fold as what actually happened.

In my "altered history" the PFE RR survived till 2005 when it was merged (operationally) into the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (the large railroad created from the 1996 merger of the large Burlington Northern Railroad with the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad), but for state and federal tax purposes the railraod and assets remained separate book entities.

This change in layout "status" will allow me to operate two or more distinct eras, depending on equipment. The 1970s can be operated with the equipment of the day, with the rainbow trains (Burlington Northern equipment of it's four predecessor roads) and Western Pacific equipment, as well as "visiting" UP, SP, D&RGW trains.

Then in a more modern operational era we can use more modern BNSF equipment, as well as some freelanced WP and PFE equipment. And still have visiting equipment from the other local roads, namely Union Pacific (the merger of UP, SP and D&RGW) and some eastern roads (CSX etc).