My Story

My story in and out of the model railroad hobby. I grew up in someway close to the railroad of family and friends as a kid. I had a uncle that was a conductor on the Seaboard Air Line and neighbor (family friend) that was a engineer on the Seaboard Air Line. I remember going to meet Uncle Bill at the Seaboard train station in Raleigh NC. He would stay with us in the fall each year for a week or two then back on the train to his home in Miami Florida. When I was between 8 and 10 years old my Uncle Paul took me down to the Raleigh Seaboard yard to see the inside of a caboose. As a kid I was hooked on model trains by then.

Later On

Later on in years things change, as a teenager it was girls and I had a girlfriend she lived next to the Raleigh freight yard in back of her house. It was the early 1960’s and I should have been interested in taking photos in the train yards. It was not till after I got married, maybe the early 1970’s that I got back interested in trains again. It was now only Seaboard Coast Line and only Southern Railway in Raleigh NC, the old Norfolk Southern was gone. My brother was building a large Southern Railway HO scale layout in his basement, up to 1950, steam and diesel. Everything was just DC then and mostly brass steam locomotives. By the mid 1980’s I had sold my small HO scale collection and got divorced. After that I worked hard and lived sort-of a wild life.

2010

I started getting back in the model railroad hobby around 2010 and now there was HO scale with DCC sound. “Boy the hobby has changed”. The plastic locomotives were better detailed with sound at a price starting at around $200. At this time I wanted to model the old Seaboard Air Line and the old Norfolk Southern of the 50’s and 60’s. The hobby could be a little frustrated at this time, there were not too many accurate railroad models made of a railroad. There were a lot of Seaboard locomotives coming out then and now the old Norfolk Southern. And no old Norfolk Southern freight cars. “It looks like if you want anything, you have to make it yourself”. In 2013 I started making some original Norfolk Southern freight car decals.

2014

Then in 2014 I started EastCoastRailroads.com and then having a few limited run accurate original Norfolk Southern freight cars made exclusively for ECR. It looked like no model manufacturer wanted to make any old Norfolk Southern freight cars. Then ECR came out with there own accurate Seaboard wood caboose which a few were sold to the A&R, D&S, NS. There were many different SAL division cabooses. By this time I had sold most of my SAL collection, I decided to only modal a small railroad. My next venture was buying a Laser Cutting machine. I had a scale drawing made of the old “Boylan Tower” from photos and the old NS freight depot in Fuquay-Varina NC. Now we have EastCoastLaserKits.com in 2019. It looks like I kept creating something locally that other model railroaders wanted.

2022

On December 31, 2020 East Coast Railroads closed it's web site. In July 2021 it reopened for a 2 months close out sale. In 2021 most of the original Norfolk Southern box cars were sold to the Norfolk & Southern Historical Society. In January 2022 the remaining ECR stock was sold to a dealer in Florida, Model Train Market.

Mike Heonis - Raleigh NC