The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2025-04-01 - The 1983 Santa Fe Southern Pacific Merger
Category RandallBack in 1983, Santa Fe and Southern Pacific almost merged together. OK almost. Then the merger got surprisingly forbidden due to what honestly with hindsight looks like bad federal decision making as both companies failed and then got absorbed by BNSF and UP respectively (so instead of ending up with 3 major railroads in the west, we only ended up with 2!) But if they hadn’t, maybe we would have more SPSF engines with their sumptuous “kodachrome” color scheme today, and I’m imagining they would have combined their respective RDCs as such:
I recently finished overhauling the Rapido RDC SP-10 as well as the Rapido RDC ATSF 192/192: new speakers, new motor(s), a single running motor/truck per engine (the other one is idle), and more little people details in there. And they run surprisingly well together on the Brancheline at the Randall Museum between the Angels Camp and the You Bet stations!
Obviously the entire thing is tongue-in-check / fiction. The automation doesn’t run the three RDCs together as shown above. Right now we have RDC SP-10 running, and later I may switch to the RDC ATSF pair as I had it in the past. We try to run stuff as prototypical as we can.