ALTA Roster

Locomotive & Rolling Stock Models Built by Interurban Era for my prototype freelanced Alta California Railway.

Since 2015, I’ve been designing and building models to support my Alta California Railway concept. The goal is to build a realistic collection of motive power and rolling stock for a class 1 regional railroad serving California & Mexico as I model it in 1968.

By track mileage, the ALTA is about 1/3rd large than the Western Pacific, with denser traffic, so the roster of equipment was carefully developed using the WP and SP&S as guidelines to determine just how much of each type of equipment we needed to realistically do the job in each era.

STEAM

While the three predecessor railroads, the South Pacific Coast, Sonoran Railway, and San Diego & Arizona all merged in 1927 to form the Alta California, they all had motive power influenced by their own mechanical departments. The aesthetic choices of each road influenced how ALTA steam would eventually look, with a variety of distinctive Western US and Mexican practices blended together to get just the right flavor without being carbon copies of other railroads’ equipment, graphic design, or paint.

Kitbashing the models themselves has been a VERY slow process due to the amount of customization I want to do to each one. Most models I’m planning are not only extensively mechanically rebuilt for reliability improvement, but also cosmetically superdetailed with new 3D printed cabs of my own design and are festooned with brass detail parts.

Alta California B-1 Class 4-4-0 #2015 poses with their diesel cousins.

Alta California M-3 class 2-8-2 #4225, freshly outshopped, poses with another recent kitbash, an ALCO RSC-2M.

4225 poses on the transfer table, showing off its pinstriping and new detail parts.

DIESEL

Diesel-Electric traction arrived on the ALTA 12 years after the merger, in 1939. The mechanical department favored ALCO & EMD products. The loyalty to ALCO in the steam era translated into strong interest in their diesels until their end in 1968. EMD always delivered what it promised, so their E6A’s got to pull the top passenger trains over the most glamourous routes, while the FT’s roamed the deserts hauling freights. We kept going back to both manufacturers for switchers, but through the 50’s we preferred ALCO, delivering a slew of FA’s, RS units, and eventually some very special Century locomotives, the unique C625 for light branchline service.

Eventually by the mid-60’s ALCO was faltering, and the salesmen from LaGrange moved in for a substantial order from EMD’s 1966 catalog to replace the ALCOs in front line service. Other than a couple of orders to MLW in the 70s, the ALTA primarily purchased EMD’s new until the very end. The ALCOs would continue on for decades after they were built, thanks to a knowledgeable mechanical department who took the time to lavish care upon them. Many ALCO’s survived into the 1990s thanks to their skill.

The Diesel projects have been coming along at a good pace, helped along by doing a variety of illustrations to figure out what I wanted them to look like beforehand.