PC: Speculative Modelling

[Philip.Kuhl@xxxxxxx]

If I am getting too far off topic here, do let me know and I'll be happy to
carry on any follow-up e-mail off-line.

Do any of you model railroaders on the list engage in speculative modelling?
This involves making one or two assumptions about developments in history
having been different than they really were, and then making logical
modelling assumptions from there.  For example, one might assume that the
Federal Government --rather than creating Amtrak-- had decided that the best
way to save the passenger train was to subsidise private railroads to
operate the passenger trains to a Government-approved level of service and
eventually with new equipment with Government-guaranteed financing.  And,
that rather than creating Conrail, the Government gave Penn Central a
Chrysler Corporation-type bailout loan and permission to prune some
unprofitable branch lines in return for more modern labor practices -- and
this worked and the PC survived.  Now, based upon these two major
assumptions, model what a healthy PC would look like in 1998!

This offers some wonderful opportunities (in my mind, at least) for deciding
logically what kind of power the modern PC would operate, what a new PC
passenger train would look like, what appropriate new motive power
classification and number series would be, etc.

Many of us model favorite times in our personal history.  (I usually model
northern Ohio in the early 1960s -- I was a boy then and there.)  And many
of us model a fictitious railroad so as to accommodate
things-that-never-were.  (My own Cleveland & Fostoria Western accommodates
my & my Dad's home town [Cleveland], my Mom's home town [Fostoria, Ohio],
and a late-1960s Tyco train set I got that was modelled after the train on
the old TV series "Petticoat Junction" and lettered "C&FW Railroad" -- I had
to come up with a railroad name to fit those letters!)  But modelling a
railroad based on speculative history is something I have never seen -- the
closest was decades ago when someone had decided to model a railroad in the
21st century.  To think that we are nearly there, and I see no prototype
even remotely approaching that model of an atomic locomotive!

Phil
Philip.Kuhl -AT- ping.be