...and blame it on Renee.

Sometimes ago in 1992, she caught her husband Ray drooling over a PFM N-20 (4-8-2 Mountain, series 4000) and quietly purchased it for him. This was the beginning of a great passion. Ray sold his four legged horses and bought iron horses, 1/87th scale. The rest is history.

Their Nostalgia trip grew from an 8 x 24 to a 14 x 34 twice around delight  of a layout. Once one can exclude the environment , one feels as in the heartland of mid  America.

Renee's Great Northern Waite Park and Ray's Soo Line from Glenwood Minn. became a most pleasant blend of fiction and recollection. Each is contributing his share of memories from their childhood in Minnesota and life in Kentucky. The resulting layout is a fantastic study in American architecture and memories of the transition era. No heavy industries, just  pleasant rolling hills, quiet villages where each can almost recognize this or that house. (especially if you lived in Minnesota). 

There is just the right amount of fiction to be able to blend Ray's Soo Line with Renee's Great Northern and enough licence to allow each other's railroad to run in each other's territory without sounding out of place. Everything is fictitious, yet everything is so prototypical. The use of a mix of real and made up names and  towns at least gives Renee and Ray the licence to do what they want and frees them from the bonds of prototype modeling a layout. Each individual model or building however is a marvel of prototype replicas and realism. They even placed pictures of the original buildings on the side of the layout. In other words, they've got the best of both.

Last summer their HO  Layout was sold and became history. In its place is a new 'O' scale Soo Line layout promising to be just as interesting and grandiose.

Visit their layout in the following pages and enjoy their Soo Line of the fifties.