I was brought up on Lionel and also my father's love of railroads. He was high enough up in the company he worked for to be able to travel by rail instead of flying whenever possible. I was fortunate enough to remember traveling on many first class trains before Amtrak. I left Lionel behind in 1978, and bought my first brass locomotive, a Westside B&O Q4b. In the early 1980's, I, along with Larry Bunce and others, started the Southern Wisconsin O Scalers. We grew and did mall shows, the Chicago National in 1984 and were the first large O Scale modular group to show at Trainfest in Milwaukee.
In 1993, I started on the NMRA DCC committee headed by Stan Ames. I also earned the NMRA Meritorious Service Award for work on the early NMRA Website.
After finishing my degree, my wife, Amy, and I moved from Wisconsin to Lisle, Illinois and I continued to add more and more O Scale items knowing some day we would have a house with a basement. That's when I met Ted Schepf and began working on his Fox Valley O Scale Layout learning all kind of things.
In 2001, I took my part time Web business full time with Chicago's Metra Rail being our largest client at the time. Amy and I also bought a beautiful older home in Dwight, Illinois where the old NYC crossed the Alton. It was here that i started to build my Richmond, Danville & Southern Railroad with the help of Ted Schnepf who did the design. I asked Ted for help as this was only my second layout built and I did not want to design something so poorly I would have to start over. Glenn Guerra, who I meet while working on Ted's Fox Valley O Scale Layout, was instrumental in the beginning with his woodworking and general carpentry knowledge.
In 2013, Glenn and I decided to start an on-line O Scale magazine called The O Scale Resource. It would be advertiser supported and free to anyone for reading. Later, Glenn bowed out and Amy and I formed The Model Railroad Resource, LLC which now includes The S Scale Resource. In addition publishing a monthly magazine, in 2017, we took over the reins and are now the promoters of the fall Indianapolis O Scale and S Scale Midwest Show.
The layout is coming along nicely, and has been used in the magazine as kind of a guinea pig to test new ideas. I have always enjoyed model building and working in all facets of what it takes to build and maintain a model railroad.
