Model railroad research, or why you must do your homework

There are several schools of thought in reseaching, building & operating a model railroad. One is freelance, which could be anywhere from "imaginary-but-quite-plausible" (think Allen McLelland's Virginia & Ohio) to off-the-wall (let's model EVERYTHING). The other is strict prototype (or as close as possible), which is where such folks as Tony Koester dwell. Then there is somewhere in between- that is, basing the railroad on an actual location, but stretching the timelines and plausibility a bit. All of these schools of thought have their supporters, and IMO they're all valid- after all, it is indeed your model railroad, and you do what pleases you.

Since I'm a devoted Frisco modeler, I lean more toward the prototype school, but faced with space constraints, I find myself having to makesome adjustments to include the industries that the real Frisco served in Paris, TX in the 1970s. Plus, I also am restricting my work to the north side of town, ignoring the Santa Fe-Frisco depot & joint yard and the interchanges with MP and Cotton Belt (well, not entirely........it'll be a staging track, but I'm getting ahead of the story here).

OK, I have location, so I only need to research the following items:

• Year modeled


• Shippers served


• Motive power used

I chose the 1970s because of the type of motive power I had (mostly 4-axle EMD and GE hood units). Only a few locomotives are in the older black & yellow scheme (two GP7s), which lasted until the last GP7 was retired in December 1979. I have five GP7s total on my roster, and from what I've found out, they were used extensively in secondary & local service, especially on this part of the Central Division. I also have two GP15-1s, a model that came to Frisco in 1977. Using these 7 locomotives together, I'm somewhat restricted to 1977 if I want to stay prototypically realistic, so 1977 it is (reserving the right to move up to 1980 provided I remove the GP7s and add a couple of GP38s in the mix, which I can do with ease). For the sake of simplicity, 1977 it is.

Paris has a massive Campbell Soup plant, first built in the mid-1960s. It has since expanded to include Prego sauces and Pace picante sauce, and still ships out soup like nobody's business. In the '70s, it was still a soup plant. Next is Merico, the bakery that made Earth Grains products (it's now a Sara Lee plant, and still quite busy). Not far from the Merico plant is Flex-o-Lite, which makes those reflective glass beads seen in reflective lenses. The other two shippers I'm including (and also found on the north side of town) is Precision Printing & Packaging (making corrugated cardboard boxes) and VFM, a feed mill and shipper of outbound grains. The interchanges with the other Paris railroads will be represented with a staging track, and they can be considered a 6th customer of sorts, since Campbell and Merico sent products in all directions out of town.

I covered motive power in a way when I discussed era modeled, but I'll touch on it again here. The Arthur Subdivision (Paris-Ft. Smith) was never a heavy-duty main line, and became more of a secondary route with the completion of a line from Sapulpa, OK south to Irving, TX which bypassed the steep grades on the Central Division as a whole. In the diesel years, this line was 4-axle territory, with GP7s handling the work. Hugo, 25 miles north of Paris, is the hub of this area, and is on the junction of the Ardmore & Arkinda and Arthur subs. Aside from the coal trains which run between Lakeside, OK and the WFEC power plant near Ft. Towson, four-axle diesels rule. GP7s usually finished their careers on the secondary lines and in switching service, being replaced by GP15-1s on the Central Division. I'm not sure if it ever happened, but I wouldn't be surprised if GP38AC/GP38-2s didn't work Paris as well during the Frisco years.

I'll discuss the layout room and trackplan in a later post.