My layout is called the Underground Railroad in honor of the Underground Railroad African American slaves used to escape to free states. It is a HO Scale free-lanced layout with a time period of the present. I have incorporated the Faller Car System into the layout.
What Was the Underground Railroad?
The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped slaves from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.
The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831 when slave Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an “underground railroad” for helping Davids to freedom.
In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported an escaped slave named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an “underground railroad to Boston.”
Vigilance Committees—created to protect escaped slaves from bounty hunters in New York in 1835 and Philadelphia in 1838—soon expanded their activities to guide slaves on the run. By the 1840s, the term Underground Railroad was part of the American vernacular.
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