Homage to the Pennsy

Nearly forty years ago I was a young pastor serving my first congregation in Mount Union, Pennsylvania.  Mount Union was the junction between the Pennsylvania Railroad (modestly called the "standard railroad of the world") and the then century-old East Broad Top narrow gauge railroad.  The Presbyterian minister down the block was a "train nut" who loved to operate Lionel trains in a spare bedroom.  It was because of Bob Holmes that my childhood interest in model trains was renewed, and before long I had a small HO layout in the basement of the parsonage, the first "incarnation" of the Blacklog Valley Railroad.

The Blacklog Valley was a rather generic layout.  It hadn't yet occurred to me to consider the era or the location of my little railroad.  But all that changed when a member of the church discovered, while cleaning out her father's garage, a dozen dust covered cardboard mailing tubes.  She asked me if I would be interested in them.    Turned out they contained calendars -- Pennsylvania Railroad calendars -- from as far back as 1938.  Others were from the 1940s and 1950s, each one featuring a magnificent 18 by 24 inch color picture of the PRR in its heyday!   Here is the picture from the 1938 calendar, titled "The Main Line of American Progress".

As I studied these amazing works of art, I noticed that the vast majority of them had been painted by Grif Teller.  Over time I discovered that for more than 30 years, Grif captured on canvas the soul and spirit of the Pennsy, working each year to produce a single oil painting that would best represent this giant carrier employing thousands of people and serving 14 states.  I began to have my favorite calendars framed to preserve them.  Five of them now hang in my train room.  Then, in the early 1980s, have moved to Holidaysburg, near Altoona, Pennsylvania, I had a chance to meet the man who painted these amazing calendars.  Grif Teller was visiting the Railroaders Museum in Altoona; so I gathered up my little collection of calendars and trucked them over to show them to the artist who painted them.

Grif was amazed at the condition of the calendars.  He marveled how long it had been since he had last seen so many of them in one place.  Graciously, he offered to autograph them all.  That just added to the special character of these wonderful paintings, now signed by the artist himself.   But what really caught my imagination was the way Grif had captured the essence of mid-century railroading in the heart of Pennsylvania.   In paintings like the 1947 picture of "Working Partners" I could see the mighty Pennsy as it roared by little Mount Union and its junction with the EBT.

The seed was planted.  The Blacklog Valley would be a bridge route from Port Royal, on the Pennsy's Middle Division mainline, to Hancock, Maryland, where it would connect with the Western Maryland.  Those magnificent calendars helped me decide on 1950 as the era I would model -- a time when heavy steam was just giving way to the new diesel locomotives that would transform railroading in America.  Scenes like the 1948 calendar's "Progressive Power" captured the essence of rural Pennsylvania in the autumn.

On a more urban scale, the 1954 calendar, "Pittsburgh Promotes Progress" showed trains roaring by the Golden Triangle at a time when Broad Top coal, carried to Mount Union in EBT hoppers, cleaned, sorted and transferred to the Pennsy, was still being used to fire the steel mills of Pittsburgh.

Over the years, those wonderful Grif Teller calendars have continued to inspire my modeling.  Because of them, the Blacklog Valley has begun to evolve, and the connection with the Pennsy has evolved with it.  The new layout is set in a time when the BVRR has ceased to be an independent common carrier, and become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pennsy.  The RS-3 diesels that haul Broad Top coal from Blacklog now bear the PRR keystone logo, even when the lettering on some of them still reads Blacklog Valley.

Is this the end of the Blacklog Valley, or just another stage in the evolution of a working model railroad?  We'll have to wait and see.  In the meantime, the calendar art of Grif Teller on the walls of my train room continues to inspire my modeling a half century after it was painted.

One last P.S. for you narrow gauge fans, who are wondering by now what all this has to do with HOn3 and the East Broad Top Railroad.  In addition to the amazing calendars painted by Grif Teller, there is one more picture hanging on the wall above my work bench -- a print by Ted Rose that I received through the Friends of the East Broad Top: It's called "Mount Union Train".  It depicts the morning crew preparing to board the train at Rockhill Furnace for the day shift at Mount Union.  Maybe it will serve to whet your appetite for the next installment of this continuing blog on how I built my model railroad.