Bulgarino Locomotive Works was founded in 2025 by Nick Bulgarino. He is a passionate model railroader with years of experience working on models. He models the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Baltimore Division in 1947, and is a member of O Scale Central, Baltimore & Ohio Historical Society, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum, and the Nickel Plate Road Technical and Historical Society.
Before founding Bulgarino Locomotive Works, Nick was (and still is) an active freelance musician who plays the trombone. To learn more about Nick as a musician, click here!
Nick began his O Scale 2 Rail modeling with a Westside B&O Q4b, which he promptly made into a nice brass kit using a short and a power pack with a defective circuit breaker. After damaging the locomotive, he was introduced to Dead Rail and Geoff Ringlé of Old Iron Designs, who has been a great mentor. Geoff repaired, painted, and lettered 4625, giving Nick his first Dead Rail engine. This inspired Nick to Dead Rail convert his D30 372, and his two C16’s 97 and 98. Nick began working with brass models to do his own repair as well. These skills helped him during the pandemic.
During Covid, Nick worked for David Vaughn on his Nickel Plate Road Kentucky Western Division and Canandaigua Southern Railroad Southern Division model railroad, featured in the 2016 issue of Great Model Railroads. Working for David, he gained the skills of model restoration and maintenance. He learned about John Armstrong’s track planning philosophy, and has worked on adding to David’s layout as well as building a traveling layout for him. This gave Nick an appreciation of model railroading as its own subset of railroading, with a history worth preserving.
His claim to fame is restoring and maintaining most of the surviving fleet of John Armstrong. His first project was repairing Canandaigua Southern V-1 1206, seen in the BLW Portfolio here. This project led to working on R1 914 (the first model John built at Purdue University in the 1930’s), and L1 1411 (the Super Allegheny). Through these projects, he not only preserved these iconic pieces, but also learned the history of John Armstrong and O Scale 2 Rail model railroading.
The goal of Bulgarino Locomotive Works is to help expand the O Scale 2 Rail hobby by providing services that make the hobby more accessible. There are so many great products on the market that make the hobby easier to enjoy now than ever before! Dead Rail electronics, which you can learn more about here, take out the expense and labor of setting up DCC or DC systems. The skills Nick gained working on the Armstrong collection can help you and your projects move along so you can focus on enjoying the hobby.