Despite most of us here being dyed-in-the-wool modellers of the New Zealand railway scene, scratch the surface and you'll find other interests that dare not speak their names; And no, I'm not speaking of being a member of the Oscar Wilde appreciation club, more the liking of offshore prototypes. Kiwibonds is a good example; That man has more N scale BNSF loconmotives than I think even BNSF have. The head druff at one stage had an OO scale Dean Goods with a selection of 4 mm celestorey coaches for it to pull. Drew is currently heading out of cell phone range with HOn30.
And me? A particular hankering after The Consolidated Rail Corporation of America (otherwise known as ConRail), circa 1976. Formed by an act of Congress to take over the assets of several bankrupt Class 1 railroads, it began running to a profit in the early 80's before being privatised in 1987 and sold off to its two major competitors, Norfolk Southern (NS) and CSX in 1997. So why 1976? Standing trackside was to watch a parade of old weary first and second generation diesels still wearing the paint schemes of their original owners with a "CR" stencil mounted somewhere, at times almost so tiny it looked like an afterthought.
So what does this have to do with today, here and now? Well, have you actually looked at whats hauling our trains? We are witnessing our very own version of the ConRail "Rainbow Years" right now. Riding home on the train last night past the depot, I counted 5 different paint schemes, and thats not counting the variations within each scheme. In the last 15 years or so we've seen "International Orange" (or Fruit Salad as it is known to the geeks), 3 different blue schemes (possibly 4), "Bumble Bee" (Black and Yellow), TOLL "Corn Cob" (or Vomit Bonnets, as Kiwibonds refers to them) and the latest KiwiRail scheme (or schemes...seems to depend entirely what crayons hadnt been grabbed by the other engineers at the drawing table that day). Riding on 547 a month ago we had 4 locos, and 4 different schemes.
Following on from Kiwibonds post on colour, I can only say this; If you like variety but think modern image modelling wont allow you to have any fun, I dont think youve looked hard enough at what is on the other side of your viewfinder.
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