Back in the 80’s while in high school, I was lucky enough to help start a new HO scale club in Antioch CA. It became known as the Black Diamond Lines. The club is still there today and doing great and the layout has never looked better. On one of my last visits I saw a buddy of mine, also a charter member, had done several locomotives in a BDL paint job with custom decals. He added me to the list of people that could order them and even though I’m in Alabama, I started doing my own BDL locomotives..... and the joke is I’m the ‘Southern’ division lol The fun part of doing the BDL locomotives is no rules. Anything goes, and I can, and do, make up my own storyline for different locomotives. It’s really a sort of modeling freedom for me and it’s a lot of fun! I thought I would share a few of my locomotives here.
My models range from the early 1900’s to the late 1950’s. You may recognize some of the designs, and you may even know where they ended up. Here is one of the BDL early power.
Wouldn’t be the ‘Southern’ division without some Southern style power. Here is a more modern BDL 2-8-2.
As the BDL grew to new levels of traffic and coal business picked up, bigger power was needed. Here is one of the larger BDL locomotives.
The 1950’s saw another surge in traffic and the BDL had to long term lease several big locomotives from other railroads. This leased locos had gold lettering and numbers added to separate them from the BDL owned units.
One of the largest and heaviest of the BDL leased units was this massive 2-6-6-6 from the C&O. It served the BDL well for many years and was a crew favorite.
This model has a custom smoke unit installed as well as a custom sound system, operating marker lights, smoke box lighting, and under cab lighting.
I love the technological, power and tonnage evolution your BDL Southern Division roster depicts. So cool! No diesels? A BDL SD45 would look good in black and gold....
Great! I wish I could find one like in your first two pictures. With the rear drive axle set farther back. I believe that's a Rogers. But I would like a wood burner with the big diamond smoke stack. I have the cars for "Green Acres" but not the girls for the water tower. And the car and tractor for the next show. Ha! I also have a 0-6-0 switcher with coal bunker on the back.
The black and white filter makes those steam locomotives look really good. Along with the natural lighting and background, some of them look like real photographs. My favorite is 109. I have the tender to that locomotive in my parts bin, but it looks much better in your paint scheme.
Almost all of the ‘older’ early 1900 models were purchased at train shows. A lot of times I bought several basket cases cheap and made one good locomotive out of them. The Rodgers #3 was the result of three broken models purchased for $5 each and made one good one.
#109 was another splice job. I actually wanted to do a Casey Jones version. I bought 5 broken models very cheap and did a Casey Jones version, still had good pieces to work with and did 109.
That's some cool looking tea kettles you have there OC. Love the mixture of B/W & Color pics adds flavor to the history.
