Some of you reading this blog may be wondering “how did this guy get so much OO info?” It is the result of a lot of work over more than thirty years, collecting Xerox copies of catalogs, reading many old magazines, etc., with help from a wide variety of people.

One big push for me in the mid-1980s was writing with the late Ed Morlok a pair of articles on American OO that were published in the October, 1986 and April, 1987 issues of The Train Collectors Quarterly. But even before that I was working on versions of checklists.

From the article work and the checklist drafts that existed from as far back as the early 1980s I completed in 1997 a manuscript version of a fairly lengthy book that I titled The American OO Checklist. At that time I looked for a publisher with no luck. Some parts of the manuscript were worked over for publication in The OO Road, the publication of the NMRA OO special interest group, and now parts of it are making it online in American OO Today mixed with new materials. This photo is of the copy of the draft I most often refer to.

While someday I would love to see some version of the manuscript published, for now I am happy just to focus on getting some accurate information out there on OO and posting about projects and models that interest me. As I have worked on posts for this blog I have also been double checking the original sources so it is also helping me in getting the info squared away better as well; I am learning new things about American OO literally every week and have been able to expand my source materials quite a bit since back in 1997 when I worked out that draft book.

For me also there is a bigger picture. I realize fully that I am in a very unique position in relation to American OO gauge today, with materials to reference and ability to post articles about it. I am a firm believer that God puts each of us in unique circumstances and there are things we can do within those. I recognize that I can make a contribution in relation to this information on American OO, and will keep working to add new material to this site at least every week.

As of now the checklist project is formally on hold. At some point I will come back to it but for the moment I am enjoying learning more about American OO and sharing it with what site statistics suggest is a varied group of readers. I have a few ideas of actual print articles that I would like to work on but on the whole I am pretty content to keep working over the materials for online publication for now, with an eye someday to a bigger publication.

Updated November 2010