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Trapped in someone else's frame? BREAK OUT!
I'm Randy Gordon-Gilmore, and ProtoTrains is a very part-time business to make kits of the 1930's
streamliner passenger trains in N scale. The "Proto" in ProtoTrains denotes two things--
the prototype, or pioneering, nature of the trains, and my desire to be as prototypically
accurate as possible ("fanatical" is a term that has been used 
) in modeling
the trains. The main focus of ProtoTrains will be the Burlington Route's shovelnose
Zephyr trains.
Aug. 2010 - I've relocated to Texas to take a new job. With everything currently in storage, ProtoTrains is on hiatus until later this fall. Thanks.
Renascence poster
The Renascence poster, a longtime dream of mine to print, is produced and for sale! This poster
is a full-size reproduction of the Burlington Route's 1935 calendar top painting of the Pioneer Zephyr.
NEW 1 Oct 2008
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Pioneer Zephyr
ProtoTrains started with my collaboration with Dick Billings of
Fine N-Scale Products to develop the very popular and successful Pioneer Zephyr kit, which we
introduced at the 1996 Long Beach convention. With the release and popularity of the Con-Cor ready-to-run
PZ, FNS has discontinued the PZ kit.
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Flying Yankee
The current project I'm working on is a similar kit of the Boston & Maine/
Maine Central Flying Yankee,
a very similar train to the PZ which ran in New England from the mid-1930's to the 1950's.
I'm really going to try to have the model ready by the time the prototype is back in operation!
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McKeen Cars
I have started work on the knife-nosed McKeen Car.
Although not quite in keeping with the other trains, they are pre-WWII and they
are streamliners.
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EMD E5 shells
In 2005, Gregg Scott of GHQ created E5A and B shells from the Life-like E6 and Joe Valerio is casting them in resin. The shells are available for purchase from Joe Valerio. You can contact him at trainutz@excite.com. They are a drop-on fit to the LL chassis. If you are a member of (or join the) Yahoo CBQ group, you can see pictures of the shells (both raw and finished) in the folder http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/CBQ/files/N%20Scale%20E5/. (As a "fantasy loco", I'm still considering making the original-concept, shovelnose E5A shell.) |
Other possibilitiesAfter that, we'll have to see. I am working on a body shell for Burlington's streamlined Hudson Aeolus. UPDATED 4 Nov 2009 I already have artwork completed for the first Twin Zephyrs (#9901,9902) and the Mark Twain Zephyr (#9903) which, together with the Pioneer Zephyr (#9900) and the Flying Yankee (#6000) comprise the first-generation Budd shovelnoses. |
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Kato has released the prewar corrugated Budd cars, of which the coach and obs are based on the GPZ design, so the task is really just to produce a Silver Charger E-unit kitbash. |
An ultimate project has to be the semi-articulated 1936 Denver Zephyr, pulled by the very elegant EA/EB
shovelnose locomotives.
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This is a 300dpi, 7.5MB PDF containing Raleigh publications AD4935 (Instructions) and AD5031 (Spoke Chart). The booklet and chart are undated, but from the document numbers I surmise that they might be from 1949 and 1951, respectively. I cleaned up the pages somewhat after scanning, but kept a high resolution to maintain the "look and feel" of the booklet--and the wonderful cover illustration of Sturmey-Archer hubs being built into wheels!
Links verified 19 Feb 2010.
Article-specific links appear in their respective pages.
Coded by hand in Alan Phillips' excellent PFE32 freeware text editor.
(Alan's website is offline, so just do a websearch for "pfe101i.zip")
Checked using 
HTML Validator.
This website should be viewable using any browser that you have;
if you can't see everything properly, please let me know and I'll fix it!
This website and all its contents is ©2002-10
Randy Gordon-Gilmore.
Established 4 July 2002. Last updated: 4 Aug 2010.
Changed webhosting 25 Aug 2010--if you find anything broken please let me know.
I was planning to make E5 A and B shells. Microscale already makes E5 decals in N scale, included
in their set 60-98, Burlington Passenger Cabs.
I also have the layout completed for the General Pershing Zephyr, which was a
four-car non-articulated train using #9908 Silver Charger, which still exists in
the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis, as the power car.