---

Introducing: the Santa Fe "Arizona Outlaw Gang"

Who did it?   "Santa Fe FM Trainmasters" is a collaboration of the following three happily over-creative individuals, collectively calling themselves the "Arizona Outlaws".



The author would like to thank the following three "Arizona Outlaws" for their brash creativity and audacious boldness in the making of this historical treatise. 

• The Project 3150 Black Ops locomotive construction and Stage 1 break-in testing, which was assigned to Santa Fe Assistant Superintendent R.D. Gustafson.   He is Atlas Forum member Randy Gustafson, 'randgust'.  Mr. Gustafson is in the photo below, taken in front of his Third District, Santa Fe Albuquerque Division railroad.  
  

---

• Stage 2, consisting of road testing over the Arizona Divide, which was assigned to Verne Niner, Special Assistant for Black Ops to Santa Fe President Fred Gurley, and the Director on ATSF Black Ops Project 3150 for Stage 2.  He is Atlas Forum member 'Warbonnet-Fan' .  Mr. Niner is on the left in the photo below, which was taken in front of his Arizona Divide Region, Seligman Subdivision, Third District , Santa Fe Albuquerque Division.

 

• Stage 3:  extended 80 MPH high speed desert running and maximum acceleration testing across the Arizona Divide in both directions; which was assigned to  John Sing of FM Black Ops, Beloit, as General Manager and Creative Director on Fairbanks Morse Project 3150.   He is Atlas Forum member "atsf_arizona", and his railroad is loosely based on the Santa Fe's Peavine Line, the branch from Ash Fork to Phoenix off Santa Fe's transcontinental main.   Mr. Sing is on the right in the photo above.  Below is Mr. Sing's 4' x 4' model railroad, which is built with hi-tech prefabricated track first envisioned in 1955 in Japan as "Una-track".  You can see more about his layout by clicking here or on the picture below:

---

The Building of 'Project 3150':

The scenery for this treatise takes place on a virtual N scale (1:160 in size) model railroad built by the three modelers above; they met on the Atlas N Scale Forum (forum.atlasrr.com). Randy Gustafson, Verne Niner, and John Sing discovered that they not only shared a mutual passion for the Santa Fe, but that their modeled layout areas of the Santa Fe in Arizona would have physically connected in real life.  Each of them had independently constructed parts of the same Santa Fe railroad in Arizona, but they  actually live thousands of miles apart.

The Atlas Forum has featured an ongoing member feature in which a model freight car is mailed from layout to layout, and photographed in action - "The Atlas Forum Car".  The "Santa Fe Trainmaster" concept follows this concept.

The origin of "Santa Fe FM Trainmasters" started with a simple fantasy wish by John Sing - "wouldn't it be great if Santa Fe really DID have FM Trainmasters?  And why didn't they, given their desire to speed up Santa Fe freight as far back as 1955?"  At the same time, Rand and Verne had been tinkering with Atlas FM Trainmaster mechanisms for other projects, and Rand offered to finish one of those mechanisms  in Santa Fe Zebra Stripe paint.  The resulting project eventually grew into the N scale "connected virtual model railroad" that you saw today; it exists only on the Internet.

Santa Fe 3150 is a stock N scale Atlas Fairbanks Morse Trainmaster, painted with Floquil #10 black, decaled with Micro-Scale black/silver Santa Fe zebra striping using decal set 60-247 (requiring two full sets), and then Dullcoted.  The locomotive was mailed and photographed on all three finished N layouts, in the manner of the Atlas Forum Car. 

In their respective home towns, Gustafson finished the locomotive along with additional conspirators in the form of the Gustafson Photoshop imaging team of Randy's three teenage sons, Robert, Steven and David.   Gustafson took the Nelson Hill, Flagstaff, and Winslow shots, he is the major photographic and design contributor of Part 2's 'Across the Arizona Divide' and Part 4, the 'Flagstaff Incident'.

Verne Niner did extreme close-up figure photography and added all the Photoshop smoke effects;  he is the major photographic and design contributor of Part 2's   'Security' and Part 3's 'Flagstaff  Incident: Countdown',  'President Gurley', and 'Reconnaissance at Riordan'.

John Sing did the blur movement shots, the high desert shots, and the outdoor dawn shots;  wrote the storyline and the Part 1 and Part 5 chapters on 'what could have been'; and built this web site.   

Here we see Verne Niner working his magic:



And here we see John Sing's 2' x 4' module (half of his railroad above, it's portable) on which he took all his indoor blur shots (artificial lighting at home), and outdoor shots (dawn natural lighting).  You can see the Santa Fe Trainmaster and the 'multi-modal' test train on the module in this photo:




Thanks for "imagining" with us.

John, Randy, and Verne

April 1, 2004

---