Realistic Names for Your Model Trains, Towns, and Industries

Names Background

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While attending the 1988 Santa Fe Modelers National Convention in Flagstaff, AZ., I overheard a conversation between two modelers. They were discussing how hard it was to come up with realistic names for town and industries on their layouts.

After returning to Dallas, I began to think about this conversation. I soon obtained a computerized zip code list of all the post offices in the US. Using some old DOS programs, I was able to sort the list both left to right and also right to left and come up with the frequency counts for the various city and town names. About this same time, I was taking a statistics class, and the big thing there was numbers. If you are not into numbers, disregard the frequency counts in the examples.

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