InterurbanEra

Interurban Era

@InterurbanEra

Building Models & Making Videos

🚋Chill model making videos & railroad history.🚊

✨I'm one of the few people on planet Earth whose day job is building model railroads for a living! It's very fun. ✨

► Go ahead and PLEASE comment on posts, I want to start great conversations on here!

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posts from @InterurbanEra tagged #Interurban Era

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InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra

Freelanced 1970s Cabover truck design

While I was in Industrial Design school in the mid 2010s I loved doing drawings from random prompts. One of my favorite I ever did was my own design for a 1970s era cabover semi truck. the challenge was to design it using the parts and limitations in manufacturing of the era, so you can see the square sealed beam headlights, riveted roof and plenty of chrome plating. I'd just recently learned the old illustration trick, known as "desert chrome" shading, and what object could possibly be better than a semi truck to show that off?

"VULCAN" is my own brand name for a heavy equipment manufacturer similar to International Harvester. Looking at this drawing now makes me want to draw some more of these.

What should I draw next?

InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra

My first film photo of a locomotive, Age 5

This is the first locomotive portrait I ever took. My mom handed me her film camera on the platform of the Amtrak station at Anaheim, CA at age 5.

Southern Pacific 6347 is an EMD GP35R rebuilt by SP to be more reliable and eek out a few more years of service, IIRC it was sold off after the merger and ended up as a WATCO engine.

Ironically it would also be the only pre-UP merger Espee portrait I'd ever take. We were taking the San Joaquin to move north to the Bay Area, and the town we settled in was on a former WP mainline and for some reason the UP freight trains exclusively used brand new GE dash 9s in armour yellow, never any ex-SP power post 1996.

The freight action through that town as so boring and the GE widecabs so relentlessly dull, it actually extinguished my interest in trains for a few years as a kid. I remember being held up as a crossing one night with my dad and saying "Ugh, I don't want to learn any more about GE AC4400s or whatever they are, aircraft seem more interesting to me now". Leave it to UP to kill my interest in railfanning at age 10.

I still cherish that my Mom handed me the camera at age 5, I still have many of the photos I took during that trip, including a Santa Fe GP30 rebuild somewhere in the central valley, and a few portraits of random passengers.

InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra
TomColetti
@TomColetti
InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra

This remains one of my favorite gifts of all time

I initially sketched this image below as inspiration back in July 2016. Tom & I got really inspired a while later, and this gorgeous painting was the result. I still need to get a large physical print of it sometime soon.

InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra

Early Saturday Morning

A sort of Edward Hopper-esque shot of some buildings I finished for a client a while ago. This is an HO scale "Merchant's Row IV" kit that I carefully, realistically painted to match some similar buildings located in New York state.

It takes some effort and skill to get these kits to truly shine, I feel that these evoke exactly the quiet, small downtown look I was aiming for.