Gory & Defeated? Never!
December 20, 2009 1:07 PM Subscribe
It's getting close to Christmas, and for many people that involves putting a
train set running around the tree.
Seasonal displays of
elaborate layouts are popular as well this time of year. One man had the ultimate train set.
His name was
John Whitby Allen, and in the middle decades of the 20th century, he built what might have been the
greatest model railroad of all time-so popular that fans keep memorial sites for it a half-century later. Put on your engineer hat and come see the
Gorre & Daphetid Railroad.
John Allen had a puckish sense of humor, and little details show up in almost
every photograph. He created a wonderful world, to include such whimsy as a complete subway station, with a train you could hear coming, but never arrived; and an
0-4-0 stegasaurus locomotive.
Not content with
scratchbuilding almost every locomotive and building on the layout, he insisted on prototypical operation - to which end he built a hotbox detecting car - which had a ball bearing riding on a rocker-shaped set of upwardly curved rails inside an otherwise normal-appearing boxcar. If one operated a train so roughly that the steel bearing rolled off the end of the track inside, it completed a circuit to light a light underneath the train-
to shame the hapless engineer for all to see.
Sadly, John Allen died in 1973 of a myocardial infarction. Two weeks later, his
wonderful railroad empire burned to the ground. Fortunately, there were photos and
slides salvaged from the wreckage.
posted by marxchivist at 1:23 PM on December 20, 2009