Excellent Northern Indiana Layout in May Model Railroad Hobbyist

If you haven't seen it already, go check out the May issue of the online-only (and free!) Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine featuring Tom Johnson's Logansport & Indiana Northern.

This shelf layout features a fictional yet reality-based northern Indiana shortline of the 80s.  Check out the excellent flatland scenery, which makes effective and convincing use of backdrops. Not a surprise that Tom is an art teacher, what with the excellently composed and executed vignettes around the layout.  The structures and vehicles certainly capture a time and place still vivid in my memory of growing up in northern Indiana in the 70s and 80s. The weedy track and grimy rolling stock capture this particular moment in US railroading.

Tom's rolling stock is expertly weathered, and his freelanced paint schemes uncannily seem more railroady and true to life than the prototypical Erie Western (an actual post-Conrail shortline) locos and cabooses that appear on the layout (see the MRH video below).

The Logansport and Indiana Northern is an inspiration to any modeler of the late 70s/early 80s and/or of the flat midwest. Tom's work certainly raises the standard to which the Dunes Junction aspires!