The Magnificent GG1

 Here's an old favorite!  Back in 1997, MTH brought out a Premier model of the magnificent Pennsylvania RailRoad GG1, a massive electric locomotive that ran under the catenary on the Pennsy mainline, now the NorthEast Corridor, which is less than a mile from my house.  When I was little, I actually rode on a train pulled by one of these beauties.  It took Pennsy two decades of experimentation to come up with the design for the GG1 and the beautiful body was designed by the famous industrial designer Raymond Loewy.  From the day it first rode the rails in 1934 to the day it was finally retired in 1983, it was admired by all who saw it.  Here in New Jersey, on the New York & Long Branch, a GG1 would haul a passenger train from NYC's Penn Station to South Amboy.  There, the GG1 would switch out (it was the original end of the catenary that provided power) and a steam locomotive (probably a K4s) would hook up to the train to take it the rest of the way to Long Branch.  In all, there were 140 of these locomotives, and many had more than five million miles on them by the time they were retired.  With 18 heavyweight passenger cars in tow, they could easily reach 100 mph on the Pennsy mainline.  This model, the first scale GG1 done by MTH, came with the original Protosound package.  I later converted it to Protosound 2 to give it a much better set of sounds and remote control.  The entire body of the model is die-cast, one of the first in MTH's series of PRR die-cast electric locomotive models.  In this True HD 1080p video, you can see it hauling a set of streamlined passenger cars.  While they aren't full scale, they are made of extruded aluminum and are in a style more typical of the toy trains of yesteryear and just seem to go well with the GG1.  The GG1 page on my web site has lots more info on this fascinating locomotive.