Modeling Childhood Memories -- I

Sometime around 1957, when I was ten years old, I had several relatives who retired and moved to Florida from New Jersey, where I mostly grew up. As a result, my family would drive down to visit them during winter school vacation. This, of course, was well before I-95; we variously drove straight down US Route 1, US Route 301, or US Route 13, which went down the DelMarVa Peninsula and (at the time) crossed the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on an automobile ferry. (An extra bonus was that the ferry unloaded right next to the Pennsylvania Railroad's own small ferry yard in Little Creek, VA, where you could see an N6b caboose, a Baldwin VO switcher, and a crane with an old L1 tender.)

Since I was too young to drive, I got to look out the window for the whole route, and especially south of Richmond, the highways used to parallel rail lines. I think US 301 mostly followed the Atlantic Coast Line and US 1 followed the Seaboard Air Line, but over the trip and the various routes we took, I got to see a certain amount of Southern and Central of Georgia. At the time the ACL was transitioning from silver-and-purple to black with yellow stripes. My mouth always watered for the Revell EMD switchers (info here) that then were available painted for ACL purple, as well as their "pulpwood cars" lettered for ACL, but never was able to get my hands on any. Just as well, the EMDs were apparently pretty awful.

So I keep my eye out for models painted in the paint schemes I admired in my earliest days railfanning. Here's a Bachmann ACL GP7:

An ACL Alco switcher:

A Seaboard Alco:

For some reason, I have vivid memories of SAL triple hoppers on these trips. Here's an Accurail:

Here's a Bowser: