I started out wanting to model the Great Northern in the final days before BN came in - but in researching and looking at pictures, it's very hard to not want to also have NP, SP&S and CBQ around too. Once I added Amtrak into the mix, I hit on the idea (not new, of course) of simply modeling the early 1970's. I fretted over the "legality" of having the mix I wanted and still keeping it prototypical, but I found that reality was far more bizarre than I dreamed, since I'm seeing pics of Zephyr F units with a couple Empire Builder B units pulling a mixed bag of NP, CBQ, GN and the occasional Amtrak painted car - all the way up into the late 70's. Here's a great link to a forum post that has a plethora of passenger shots from that era - truly inspring to anyone wanting to model the 70's in the NorthWest. http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=200588
This is just another example of never letting anyone say "the prototypes never did that". It seems you can always find photographic evidence to the contrary
Late 70s? The rainbow era was really over (sadly) by the mid-70s. But you're right, they were interesting trains.
This one is epic, North Coast Hiawatha out of Butte, MT. Awesome!! Trying to model this one in Z-scale, as Micro-Trains has made about all of these cars in Z-scale.
