The Fabulous Franklin and South Manchester Railroad
The modeling talents of George Sellios (of the famed FS&M) heavily
influenced the building of the BS&T. When searching for the
FS&M / George Sellios, I was disappointed with the amount of
information available. At one time, Ken Spranza's horailroad.com was
one of the few sites with FS&M photos, as was James A. Powell's
trevinocircle.com, and the aforementioned Gotham Subdivision by Matt
Gidley. Recently, George Sellios made policy changes for visitors to
the FS&M requesting that no photos be taken, and in turn, George
has started offering an image CD with pictures of his newest creation,
Filmore Yard. The CD is available online from his
FineScaleMiniatures.com website. As such, it is likely that we wont
see many more new photos of the FS&M on the web.
When visiting the BS&T for the first time, I distinctly remember seeing a tattered copy of The Fabulous Franklin and South Manchester Railroad, and when thumbing through its pages, was struck with how heavily the BS&T had been influenced by its contents. Cheeky company names, humorous vignettes, and trash-a-plenty were but a few of the details that the BS&T gleamed from its pages. Fine Scale Miniatures offered the book, but since has stopped carrying it. It was only by chance that I recently discovered that Model Railroading still had copies of the book available! I ordered a copy just before Christmas, and it arrived promptly. Looking back over the pages, I recalled how inspirational the book was, and that it made an invaluable addition to my modeling library. Since then I have visited the Model Railroading site only to find they no longer offer the book, and that now the only available copies are used on Amazon.com.
Linn Wescott's Magic of Model Railroading with John Allen was a classic publication, and now having been out of print for quite some time, is typically valued at $200+ used from online vendors. Methinks it would be prudent to get a copy of the Fabulous Franklin and South Manchester Railroad before it become more invaluable then it already is...
