Hello and welcome to this new blog in which I will document the gathering of information for, the design of and hopefully the building of a N scale model railroad set in 1950s Iowa and based on the south end of the 10th district of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad between Oskaloosa to the north and Albia to the south.
Who am I?
My name is Naomi and I'm an archivist (by trade and inclination) living in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I have long been fascinated by the M&StL. I can trace this back to a chance buying of a photograph, showing red and white EMD F units approaching the Oskaloosa, Iowa, passenger station from the north, back in 1988 at a meeting of the Contactgroep NMRA Nederland. I had just joined that group and at the twice a year meeting there was a man selling all kinds of postcards and photographs he had collected when he lived in the USA.
My second purchase was a postcard of Wabash Railway EMD F units at a location in southern Ontario, Canada. Another fascination (but less intense) was born. Much later I found out that both railroads had one point in common. That point being Albia in southern Iowa.
For a long time I didn't know what to choose to model and since my railroad interests are rather broad, I collected lots of stuff like books and magazines but never actually build a home modelrailroad. The usual other things like time, space and money interfered too. Around 2006 I made the choice to concentrate on American prototypes and specifically the M&StL. Since then I have dabbled in building modules as I became a member of Fremo and have participated in meetings of the Fremo americaN N scale group since 2009.
However, a severe physical illness (the result of a medical treatment gone wrong) in 2011 and following years (I'm still not in the clear) let to severe mental health problems as well. So I never got around to fixing the problems I had with the modules I had build.
It's only now, october 2015, that I feel well enough to try again. I sorely missed having something to run my model trains on. I didn't even have something to let my locomotives go back and forth or in a circle. I'm convinced it would have proven quite beneficial for my mental health if I had.
So, come along as I try to organise my thoughts, gather information from numerous sources and finally start getting active again in model railroading.
