Welcome to narrow Gauge Chaos

This site is dedicated to information about industrial railways and rusting relics from our past.  Growing up in the northwest corner of Montana provided me ample opportunities to discover old mining equipment and traces of logging camps.  The history bug bit early and has never let up.  The prototype information scattered about this site was collected over the years by my grandfather, Robert Pearson and myself.  In addition to historical information this site chronicles my adventures in model building.  The majority of the models are constructed to the rather strange scale of 1:13.7 or  7/8" to the foot.  This scale comes from building models of 2' gauge prototypes that run on G - gauge track.  Constructed from a variety of materials - mostly brass and a few assorted commercial parts - the models are inspired by actual equipment but are not always exacting replicas.    Cheers,  Marty Johnston, St. Paul, MN USA    Comments are always welcome: mejohnston@stthomas.edu

Recent Site Updates:

May 6, 2022 Added material, if you would like to use the photos please contact me.

April 25, 2018 It's been awhile. Cleaned up some broken links and started "remodeling".

September 8, 2010 Added photos of compressed air and fireless locomotives in the Robert Pearson Collection.

Nov 7, 2009 Site was hacked - I think that it is all cleaned up - what a pain.

August 28, 2009 Tweaked the look and fixed a few bugs.

August 27, 2009 Added some new links and a pdf of the 6th ed of a Porter Catalog in the Robert Pearson Collection.

August 17, 2009 Added new material to H Dumpty & Son's and completed the revision to the Robert Pearson Collection.  All links should be active.

August 11, 2009 Added a significant amount of new material to the Robert Pearson Collection.

May 26, 2009 Started a rework of the Robert Pearson Collection.