North Coast Limited

[Chet]

I saw that under rated railroad posting. For it's size and the history behind the railroad, it is quite under rated. Back in the 70's, I had a large N scale layout with over 11 scale miles of main line alone, but the locomotives at that time were crude compared to what we have today. The layout was torn down and I moved on to HO scale. Eveb then, Northern Pacific locomotives were scarce and many not even painted correctly. I had to custom paint an few and detail them properly so I could have them show up on my layout.

As I mentioned, I had relatives working on the railroad, both the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road, but I didn't have the room to do justice to even a subdivision of either railroad, so I decided to freelance, and build a short line railroad right in the area where I live, connecting to both the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road. This was I could have power from both railroad show up on my railroad.

In recent years, manufacturers have started to introduce more power painted for the NP. There are a few of them producing the A and B units painted for the NP, but talk about pricey. Also, most of them were DCC only. Along with that, no one offered a correct set of passenger cars for the NCL. I was able to acquire a number of Walthers cars having generic cars painted in the Lowey scheme.

The North Coast Limited would never had shown up on my branch line railroad, but having ridden on the NCL numerous times growing up, I couldn't resist trying to assemble my version using what cars were available. Where I live, the NP has a lot of history. The model railroad club I go to is ion the basement of the old Northern Pacific depot in Livingston, MT, about 50 miles away, which is now a museum. Every one in a while I'll roll it out of my hidden staging tracks and run it for a while just to see the cars in that Lowey paint scheme I remember so well.

Unfortunately, I am unable to run it at the model railroad club. They had a limited space for their layout and due to this, there are a few places where the tighter radius can cause derailments due to the diaphragms on the cars. One member picked up the entire Empire Builder that Walthers offered and he had to change all of the couplers to ones with a bit longer shank to have them run on the club layout. I like the close coupling on the cars I have and am not willing to do this.

They do have a beautiful layout at the club. Of course, they do operate DCC as there are times when we can have as many as 10 trains running at the same time.

Here's one of my very few DCC locomotives, an Atlas Gold RS-1 painted for the Northern Pacific. I am a big fan of early Alcos and couldn't pass it up. I have a fleet of Alco RS-1, RS-3's, RS-11's and RSD-4/5 all custom painted for my freelance Logan Valley railroad.





It is nice to see more locomotives coming out properly painted for the Northern Pacific, but I really have more power than I really need for my layout so no more purchases of locomotives is planned.