Tony Koester on Becoming an Expert Model Railroader

What does the future hold for the Allegheny Midland? Well, there's a couple of fun things that I've animated. I'm going to extend a branch out in other room. So I'm going to be back to laying track and doing scenery. I'm going to put a full-blown signal system on there, and probably invent several new words for the language while I'm doing it. So there'll be a CTC machine in the other room, and I think that's going to be really important to the future of the railroad because you can't expect all these guys to run with equal degrees of proficiency and some of them get confused and wonder into places they're not supposed to be. With a CTC system, and the signals, and everything locked up, they're not going to go anywhere the dispatcher doesn't want them to go, without tripping a detector saying, "Hey, somebody's not where they're supposed to be". So that's another thing. Sound is getting bigger and bigger. I've got most of my steam fleet now equipped with a sound system. It's again, the Dynatrol system offers a sound system. They do not market it for HO. It's not supposed to be jammed into an Atrial Tinder-- But you've done it? We've done it. Cheat River Engineering has done it for me, and it's been nightmarish. Sometimes it takes hours and hours of troubleshooting, but we've made it work, and it's great when it works. What's model railroading taught you? Would you say? What have you gotten out of it? What's it mean? Well, it's taught me for one thing, that there is a life other than work. I think a lot of us can get completely wrapped up in our work. And I'm very proud of the fact that I'm a professional magazine editor. I mean, working with words has always been a noble profession and there's a lot of wonderful people in the past that have done that. And so I'm proud to be a member of that particular group. On the other hand, if you are so wrapped up in your work, and I think I was at RMC, I think I was way too wrapped up in who I was. I was RMC, well no I wasn't, I was merely a person working there. And I think you get this mindset that is not healthy. And I see that with our scientists at Bell Corp, they are some of the finest scientists in the world winning prizes and everything, but that's who they are a lot of them. And I think a lot of them I noticed too though, are musicians or flyers or whatever. And I think that that's what model railroading does for me, is that it makes me a much more well-rounded person. And when I'm at work, I can get into arguments at work and keep them on a professional level. They aren't who I am. So I don't have to have these, absolutely life-threatening victories at work, or defeats, because I'm a model railroader as much as I'm a magazine editor. So it's very important to me. Almost all the friends that I have, almost all the traveling that I do overseas, anywhere else, is because of some connection to model railroading, very little is business. And those of us who are a little less involved in the hobby, and are wondering about those crazies, like Custer, who are more involved in it; I would say that, the only danger about getting too involved is that you can ignore your family to an excessive degree. You can, for instance, when my boys were young and the girls were young, we were involved in sports, my kids were college basketball players and athletes, and I coached Little League, and I did those things and the railroad suffered. Well, that's the way it needs to be. But by the same token, now that we're doing some traveling, the fun trips, I try to take Judy with me. She was involved in the hobby when she used to work at Karsten so... I would say that if you're careful and don't neglect your family, model railroading is probably one of the most important things you could possibly do with your life. It's balanced, like everything else in life. That's exactly right. But maybe it's a little heavier, the scale's tipping a little towards the model railroad side. We love it.