My first "train" that I can remember was some sort of monorail affair that my Air Force father brought back from Japan. The train/engine/cab was cylindrical with windup friction motor. It hung below a steel rail that looped and circled around, up and down. I don’t remember much more about it except that if you scratch the cheap paint job off of it you could see a Slitz beer can under the paint.

Grandfather Glaub was a chef on the Chicago Northwestern. I can remember eating lunch in the dinner on a Thanksgiving holiday with my mother and father. The traditional turkey with all the "dressing" was ordered. Somewhere between Milwaukee and Green Bay Wisconsin, out came a cart with a monstrous bird, huge bowl of dressing, and lot and lots of other goodies. The eyes of the other passengers bugged out and they sure did seem to mumble under their breaths about their standard portions of holiday fair.

Over the years I had the Christmas train sets, a American Flyer stands out in my mind. It had a (I now know) a Fairbanks/Morris engine of some sort done out in Chicago Northwestern green and yellow. Later, I received an Anthern’s HO Pennsy 40 box car and a Burlington caboose and so started my modeling hobby. Living in apartments left little room for a layout so I joined the Napa Valley Model RR Club. Wanting something different from SP’s Grey and Red, I discovered Great Northern Blue. Almost as fast as I could start making models, along came the merger. For a modeler actually it was good news; all those color schemes, the different kinds of equipment. I did receive some static from other die-hard SP fan club member’s about my ‘Blue Goose’. This blue streak of mine consisted of 20 or so 50 foot pug box cars, three-bay hoppers and a 50 foot Boeing Yellow High cube flat car. They trailed behind two GP-9’s and a F-45 with an extended copula caboose following up behind. The blue cowled F-45 brought many comments but there were always insipid remarks about the GP-9’s running backwards from the straight laced SP modelers.

A good railroading buddy from the club and I took several photo trips in the north country looking for trains the color of rainbows. We would do 2 & 3 day weekends traveling up as far as Vancouver, Canada and once as far East as Shelby, Montana. These were in the days of 70 MPH limits and cheap gas. We were on the move the whole time. Twice I took my two week vacations to travel the GN route along US 2 to Superior and St. Paul.

While in the Navy training at Great Lakes Illinois, my weekends consisted in running up and down the Mississippi from Galesburg to St Paul. After the Navy, merging with my lady before there was a hostile take over try, the ‘corporate’ office was move to the Evergreen State. She wanted to be closed to her mother and I....well....the Auburn Washington yard was 3/4 of mile from our first apartment.

While there are some web pages featuring GN images most are black and white. The blue scheme (in color) is kind'a rare. I hope you enjoy these pictures. I’m not a professional and I’ve done what I could to clean them up a bit. As JPG files some quality is lost. If you would like a higher quality image drop me an e-mail. Other than the Empire Builder all images are owned by me. Feel free to add them to your personal private use/collection if you care to. Any commercial use is prohibited. Check back as I add more rail tails in the future. Don