Model Railroading on the Cheap

   Right at the edge of my layout where it is easy to see up close is an industrial spur track big enough to hold two cars that I originally called Edgeport Industries. I thought they could make widgets or something. However after finding several light weight plastic John Deere tractors suitable for a few flat car loads I changed their business plan from manufacturing more toward tractor sales. Now we often see a car load of tractors here.

   Just behind this industry and not seen in this photo is the Love Coal Company, a flat paper coal tipple by Walthers that handles both loaded and empty hopper cars on an opposite facing spur track off the Hillton Junction passing siding. This makes for interesting switching for the local peddler freight train.

   I wonder if these men at the Edgeport Tractor Emporium are deliberating what to do with those old steel wheeled models now that the newer tricycle style tractors are arriving on rubber tires? There is another story of activities on this busy first corner of the layout. Just change the scenery a bit and you can have a whole new story see page 96.

Another view of the Tractor Emporium

   I have always liked farm tractors as colorful flat car loads.  There was a time when I was tempted to cheat the scale by using tractors by Ertl, They do lots of 1/64^th scale tractors that are real nice. They don’t do much 1/87^th stuff.  However with lots of time (years) and patients I was able to find enough HO scale size tractors to populate my layout. I got rid of the S – scale stuff.

   Here is a sampling of other makes of tractors, a steam traction engine, and a crawler type John Deere painted yellow for the highway department. I really like the sign elevating an old style John Deere tractor to new heights atop of the modern sign. It was included in the assortment of plastic John Deeres of several vintages intended as Christmas tree ornaments. The assortment included a steel wheeled GP (like atop the sign), a model B, a Model 50, and a 4 wheel drive large size model with air conditioned cab that I can’t identify, and a plastic watch fob that I filed the nub off the back, and glued two of them back to back to make this modern sign.

Too many tractors at Edgeport Tractor Emporium

   We modelers sometimes tend to get too much of a good thing. I have always liked colorful loads for flat cars such as farm tractors, this is an example:

   My grandson and I turned the building around 90 degrees to better see the other side during a photo session. This view shows the Love Coal Tipple (my renamed Walthers ‘Norfolk Coal’ paper flat) in the background and there is the tall home-made John Deere Sign that I am proud of, but the foreground is just too cluttered.  It includes too wide a time frame of history to be believable. Bulldozers and tractors on steel wheels with a truck load of rubber tires in the same scene is rather hard to believe. 

  The green Ford stake bed truck is probably a 1954 model, the John Deere GP tractors on the red flat car, was built in the 1930s and not much later. Maybe this mixing of eras is called modelers license, I am not sure, but I was having fun dressing my layout.