Owner Inspiration & Techniques on the B&O L&S Division

Your B&O runs from East Grafton, West Virginia to Fairport, Ohio in 1954. Why did you model this portion of the railroad rather than say something like Cumberland, Maryland? Well, I was reading books mainly the Steam Finale volume one and two, and I was looking for a yard and I found it. And the yard happened to be in Grafton, West Virginia. And I started at that point to do the entire layout from that point. Just based on a yard, that was the focal element for you. Yes. Well, that's kind of an unusual approach to it. What's the L&S division. What's that mean? It stands for myself and Bill Sandusky, my mentor. And that's just what you call the railroad. There was no such-- There was no such, it's a fictitious name. Now you have an interesting reason I think for selecting the B&O to model. Tell me about that. Well, my father-in-law, he used to take me down to the Riverdale yards in Riverdale, Illinois, and I saw what he did for a living. He worked on the freight cars. He removed the wheels, he removed the wheels on the freight trains. He was a heck of a person. And I really was inspired by him. One year, he was working in the outside in the yards and two trains came in at the same time and they both happened to hit each other head-on. Oh. Not at great speeds, but they still managed to derail the engines and several cars. And he laughed all this time about it, because he saw it coming and he ran towards the tower and nobody paid attention to him. How important is coal mining to your layout? Well, in the 1950s, coal was starting to be phased out by railroads and by businesses too. Oil has started to replace everywhere, oil heat in your home and oil fired engines. The diesel electrics, they become very practical and cheap. Costs were half as much just for fuel alone. Maintenance dropped like crazy because of the diesel electric. That meant personnel left too. Mm-hmm.