Tony Koester
American rail modeller
J. Anthony Koester, more commonly known as Tony Koester, is a well-known member of the United States model railroading community. Along with his friend Allen McClelland and his Virginian & Ohio, Koester popularized the idea of proto-freelancing with his HO scale model railroad, the Allegheny Midland.
Born in Iowa, he moved with his family to Cayuga, Indiana. At Purdue University in the early 1960s, he studied electrical engineering, communication, and art. While at Purdue, he was also a member and president of the Purdue Railroad Club. In 1966, with Glenn Pizer he co-founded the Nickel Plate Road Historical & Technical Society to preserve the memory of his favorite railroad.
In 1969, Koester and his wife and children moved from Indiana to northeastern New Jersey to take a position with Carstens Publications as editor of Railroad Model Craftsman. In 1973, the company moved to Newton in northwestern New Jersey, and the Koesters built a new home that housed his final two model railroads. He had developed a close friendship with Jim Boyd, who joined Carstens in 1971 and in 1975 became the editor of Railfan & Railroad. It was Koester's exposure to the V&O and eastern mountain coal railroading in the Appalachians that led him to develop the concept of the Allegheny Midland.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tony Koester” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.