An Introduction

First of all, I'd like to welcome you all to my blog. I'm Dan Lindfors. I have been in the model railroading hobby since I was 5 years old when I received a HO Walthers Trainline train set for Christmas. Since then, I had been modeling in HO standard gauge for many years, with my interests sort of changing around from time to time as I went. This included the Santa Fe, Milwaukee Road, BNSF, Duluth Missabe & Iron Range and Rio Grande, steam and diesel, passenger and freight. But none of this was what really mattered most to me, as I would find.

I have been a longtime fan of Colorado narrow gauge, however, and the Denver & Rio Grande Western and Rio Grande Southern railroads in particular. In 2003, when I was 9 years old, my family took a vacation which included rides on both of the surviving portions of the Rio Grande narrow gauge. I had seen them on videos previous to this, but the trip further put interest in my mind. Here are a couple of photos from that 2003 trip: 

Fast forward a couple of years to 2005. During a visit to the California State Railroad Museum, I picked up a copy of Robert W. Richardsons' book "Rio Grande: Chasing the Narrow Gauge Volume 1," and looking through the photographs in the book, the hook set deep. The following year, Blackstone made their first release of HOn3 K-27 mikados. I had taken notice of the advertisements in Model Railroader magazine depicting these locomotives, and I knew that's what I'd really love to model. Over the following several years, I picked up a Blackstone K-27 and a few pieces of rolling stock, but at the time I was staying in HO standard gauge, as I had quite a bit of time and money invested in that by this time. My true desire was set aside for quite some time. 

In May of 2013, after almost 10 years, another trip was made to Narrow Gauge Country. This included rides on both remaining segments of the Rio Grande narrow gauge once more. Again, a couple of photos:

Though my interest in the Rio Grande narrow gauge was still very, very strong, I had not yet been convinced to go deeper into modeling it at this point. That changed the following year, in 2014.

In August of 2014, I attended the Fireman School at the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, one of the two remaining segments of the narrow gauge. For over a decade now, the railroad has hosted several classes each season where folks can pay to experience a few days rotating through the cab of a steam locomotive on a train of freight cars learning how to fire or run. It was an amazing experience, but most importantly to me, it really fired up my interest in modeling the Rio Grande narrow gauge. Here's a link to a GoPro video I took during that trip: In the cab of Engine 489 from Cresco to Cumbres

The experience was so amazing that in June of 2015, I returned to do the Engineers side of things. Again, here's the link to a GoPro video from this trip: In the cab of Engine 488 from Lobato to Cresco

That was it, my interests were firmly cemented. After some thought to how I wanted to approach building a narrow gauge layout, I finally began construction in 2018 of a 4x8 HOn3 layout based roughly on the Model Railroader magazine Virginian project railroad from 2012, but flipped and somewhat modified to fit my desires. After 2 years, this is what the layout looked like just before I put it away when other projects came along and stole my focus, along with being busy working for a shortline railroad by this time.

And that was that for the time. Early in 2022 though, I revisited my HOn3 model railroading desires. The old layout, being proto-freelance, just wasn't doing it for me anymore as I wanted to go to full prototype modeling. Thus began the journey that has led to the layout to be featured on this blog, but I will dive into the journey in future blog posts.

For now, Happy Model Railroading! See you down the tracks.