Hi,

Replying to this a little late, but there is a story I'd like to pass on...

I remember reading Al's classic article back when it was published. It was a total inspiration, and encouraged me to make my first attempts at making castings of my own.

The car side castings I did back then were for the PRR class G23 "battleship" gon. I made a side master, cast up a pair of sides, and went on to complete the rest of the car. This was back in the very early 1990's, when prototype modeling in general had not yet reached the level we have today, and when prototype modeling in N scale was basically unheard of.

It was also at this time that I attended my first PRRT&HS convention. I brought my completed G23 model to the model contest. I didn't have a whole lot of self-confidence back then in my modeling skills, and I was kind of afraid to display the model, lest people look at it and laugh. But I entered it in the contest anyway.

As it turned out, nobody laughed. Instead, one older fellow was carefully examining my model, and I came over to talk with him and we spoke for a while. After a few sentences, this fellow explained "I've built a battleship gon myself, but I did the C&O version". It had not yet occured to me to look at his name tag, but when I did, yes, you guessed it, it said "Al Westerfield".

You could have knocked me over with a feather!

- Claus Schlund