Model Trains Gold Coast Qld

[Michele Firmasyah]

TheGold Coast Railroad Museum was founded in 1956. The museum was built on the former Naval Air Station Richmond. With over three miles of tracks, the old base was an ideal place to build a railroad museum.

The Gold Coast Railroad Museum is one of three Official State Railroad Museums in Florida.[2] It became a Florida state railroad museum in 1984 when it received statutory recognition by the Florida Legislature as meeting the four statutory criteria, including: its purpose is to preserve railroad history, it is devoted primarily to the history of railroading, it is open to the public, and it operates as a non-profit organization.

The museum's train rides allow guests to board vintage trains and get a taste of the past. On certain days, guests can ride in standard gauge railway cars and can also ride in the cab of the train's locomotive. The separate 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge Edwin Link Children's Railroad also offers rides.[3]

East Swamp & Gatorville Railroad 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge[5] 4-4-0 Locomotive #3. Built by Crown Metal Products; donated by Edwin Albert Link. Originally coal-powered, but now runs on compressed air.

The Gold Coast Railroad Museum has over 40 pieces of railroad rolling stock and equipment. They are currently in the process of selling of some of the equipment to continue to operate a financially stable museum.[6]

The Gold Coast Railroad Museum exhibits include a number of model railroads in many scales, including N, HO, O27, and G scale. The collections and equipment on display have been donated or loaned to the Museum for the public's enjoyment.

Has anyone ever seen any articles on converting a HO passenger car to a "Jim Crow" car. I have never seen any available commercially but sadly it was part of the "Ol South" and they were quite often seen on many trains.

I remember someone emailing me with a similar question a few years back, I think his name was John and a member of this forum. There's plenty of prototype info available for a person to model some units but I haven't seen one done yet. If no one turns up anything here, I would suggest contacting the historical societies. Here's a discussion from a while back on the TRAINS forum:

See the article "Scrathbuild a mixed-train combine" by Dick Scott from the February 2006 Model Railroader p. 78. Scott showed how to model a Louisville & Nashville combine with a center baggage compartment and passenger compartments at each end. The prototype was used to comply with segregation laws on mixed trains. Scott's model was in O scale, but some of his techniques could be used in HO, and the overall project could be a guide to kitbashing such a car.

As a historical note, one of these cars was restored and used with the locomotive "General" in the L&N's commemoration of the centennial of the Civil War "Great Locomotive Chase" in 1962. I was a high-school student when I rode the car behind the ancient steam engine when the "General" visited New Orleans.

If you're trying to make a model of a specific prototype, you need to find a model of a car whose exterior looks similar. While some such cars may be road-specific, most, as far as I know, were simply a standard coach which was separated into two sections, either with a partition or a simple sign, as on the example shown in Tom's link.

In Canada, we had cars with separate sections, too: smoking and non-smoking.

These cars are seldom modeled, but were rather ubiquitous across the South. I suspect that embarassment about the policy they represent is the reason, but that type of car can really "place" a model railroad in a time and general location. If you look through the sections on Southern short lines in Lucious Beebe's classic Mixed Train Daily, most all of the steam trains shown have a Jim Crow car. That book emphasizes the "wedge shot" of the front of the train, but there are several good photos of the Jim Crow combines on a number of lines. Georgia's Sylvanina Central Jim Crow car is nicely depicted on page 38. Wadley Southern's Jim Crow car is shown on page 32. These cars were found in both wood and metal "heavyweight" varieties. The center baggage compartment seems to have been a rather common arrangement.

In addition to my HO logging line, I have a garden railroad (F Scale - 1:20.3) that represents a line running down here in South Carolina in the 1930's. I have thought of simply taking a pair of Bachmann combination cars and splicing them together; using only the one baggage compartment in the center. The overall car would thus be lenghened and the trussrods would have to be rebuilt, but generally it would be a straightforward project. When folks ask "what kind of car is that?", it would offer a "teaching moment".

I realize that cars such as this were a part of life "back then", and pretending they didn't exist is just wrong. So if you are modeling this, please remember the ignorance and inhumanity that caused it to be.

Some newer (as in built right after WWII) passenger cars, such as the N&W's P2 coaches simply had a partition in the car to separate each sections, but it only had doors at one end (I have the MTH model). The Southern's Tennessean had coaches that were also partitioned but had doors on each end.

I have a kit of car sides (N scale) for a Santa Fe streamlined divided coach. Union Station kit #7504. I don't know if something similar is available for HO or other scales. I have not built mine nyet. I need it to model an authentic Texas Chief of the mid 1950s.

I seem to recall that MR had a drawing and feature with pictures around 1957 or 1958. My mind say's it was a Central of Georgia car but don't hold me to any of this. I know I saw an article when I was a kid and these were the on;y mags I read then.

If I remember correctly, I read somewhere that often the Jim Crow car was a combine with the baggage section between the other cars in the passenger train and the passenger section in the combine. This seemed to be the easiest way to separate the white and black folks. The thing that always seemed funny to me about segregation was that the staff in most passenger cars was almost exclusively black during this time period, if photos are any indication, so it would seem that segregation was a flawed proposition from the very start.

From the Passenger car list, this car is modeled after Kansas City Southern cars 234-238, built in 1940. Randall's "Streamliner Cars, Volume 1" describes these cars as "66-seat Divided Coach, 8-seat Smoker". I'd love to see the floor plans, as it's conceivable the divider is for the smoking area, but I doubt it.

I also found a Jim Crow diner. It was a "...divided grill coach with double counter service". Lest there be any doubt on this one, the seating areas on the floor plan are labeled "colored" and "white". These cars were from the MP & T&P Eagles.

If I were modelling the South during the Jim Crow era I would use a bit of creative licence and deem that on my layout, racial segregation never happened. Unless someone is creating a layout for a museum, I don't believe there is anything wrong with that.

Up until the late 1950s->early 60s Bag-Dorms were used as modern Jim Crow cars on trains that ran in or to the south. But like Jason, in my modeling world there is no segregation or civil unrest. For me the Bag-Dorm will be just another revenue producing car behind a sleek group of EMD E-units.

When modelers ask me about my feelings regarding segregation on trains from the past (I'm a Back Latino).......I remind them that many commercial airliners and interstate buses also had some form of segregation, so I don't dwell on it and acknowledge it as a painful part of history. I just want to enjoy this hobby.

If I visit a layout where a modeler exhibits a Jim Crow car, then so be it. Like many of us, he's trying to capture the look of a real world prototype. My interest would be in the paint job and weathering techniques.

There is an exceptionally fine article on the topic of the Jim Crow era (passenger cars and depots) in the February 2001 issue of Trains magazine, by John Edward Wilz. Not many photos but solid information.

And lest we in the north get smug about this some years ago at an antique store I saw for sale signs that marked restrooms for whites and Indians -- I believe the items were marked to have come from a Northern Pacific depot. I had never heard of such a thing and while the southern railroads had at least the excuse that they were compelled by some state laws to segregate, I am not sure the NP had any such basis.

My layout isn't intentionally segregated, but there are only three people on it who don't fit the majority profile - and two of them are toddlers. This isn't a result of turning a blind eye, this merely recognizes that non-Japanese in up-country Japan in the 1960s were only slightly more common than polar bears in Panama.

As for the three oddballs, the little boy takes after his mother (and looks Japanese) while the younger girl shows very few non-caucasian features. (This is still true now, 49+ years later.) The other is that squirrely gaijin with the camera and notebook who has been all over the local rail facilities.

When I first went to Japan in the mid-1950s there were still a few 'Occupation' EMU cars running on the Chu-o Sen out of Tokyo. The closed section at the front of the first car had been reserved for Allied troops and families during the military occupation. By the time I got there the occupation was history and those compartments were just as full of commuting salarymen as the rest of the train.

If the era and locale you model would have had Jim Crow cars, by all means add one to your train. Contrary to what some segments of the population think, doing do does NOT mean you support the sort of practices that led to the existence of such things. It's a part (shameful though it may be) of our history - to ignore that there ever was such a thing is the surest way to see it happen again. Like the famous quote from George Santayana - those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There good things in the past and there are evil things in the past - we cannot choose to just remember the good things. Like it or not, the evil is a part of who we are and how we got here. The best we can do is never forget it and never allow it to happen again.

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