Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Conrail on the Onondaga Cutoff - On the Cover of Model Railroader!

There are still surprises in life.  

I'm thrilled to present the August 2021 cover for Model Railroader magazine, with a neat kitbashing article taking the cover - a kitbashing piece I wrote for the Conrail C30-7A!  


This blog has an entry from several years ago describing the build, and in discussing with one of the Senior Associate Editors at MR, he advised that I should pitch it to the Editor.  I did, and it was accepted; I moved ahead with the whole piece.  It was submitted in January 2021 and in just 7 months was printed - with a cover shot to boot!  

This is the second MR cover shot for the Onondaga Cutoff, but the first with Conrail locomotives front and center.  Ever since Mike Tylick's pieces on building a junction module based on the Boston Line in the late 1980's, I have hoped to get Conrail, my 'home' prototype and modeled railroad, on the cover - and here we are.  

The whole thing is surreal and too-good-to-be-true, a lifelong dream achieved at 44 years of age.   From the start of this blog through to now is quite a journey and God willing there is quite a bit more left in the tank.  In some ways I think I'm just getting going, although this one is going to be hard to top.  May the best be yet to come!  

5 comments:

  1. Great article, but I agree with you 100%... it is great to have Big Blue on the cover. I remember Mike's article too and his gritty Conrail module was realistic for its era, just as your layout is realistic for your time frame. Nice job!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Question: was the article submitted before or after the "fall from grace" of #6577? I didn't seen any evidence of damage in the pictures in the article, so you must have done a great job of fixing it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The article was submitted after the repair - while a few images were from the original (the kitbash photos) the finished photos were all more recent. Juniata Shops did a good job on this one. LOL Thanks for the comments & support!

      Delete