Track plans: 2

This post will be updated later with an image, but right now I'm on the laptop and not near the scanner, so I'm just going to write it.

The next design I seriously considered was to have been a shelf layout. It wasn't my own design, but that of my friend Ken. It was to go along the wall of my bedroom on the first floor of our house. The idea was to run from a small yard with an engine house, meandering through a woodsy terrain, past a spur serving an industry (which I decided would be a furniture factory -- I'm not really sure why) and terminating at a tiny port with a car ferry. If I recall correctly Ken and I decided passenger service would be mainly a single gas-electric railcar.

Two things appealed to me about this idea. First, it was going to be high on scenery. The second is that it would go from one place to another.

That's unusual for a small shelf layout, I think. Usually they depict a single location, like the Model Railroader Kinnickinnick Ry. & Dock Co., found in the book Popular Model Railroads You Can Build.

Because in all my railroading fantasies, it was the idea of creating a miniature world and depicting the movement of trains from one place to another that most appealed to me.

TAMR

In the early 1970s I belonged to the Teen Association of Model Railroaders and went to a couple of events they sponsored, one in Wilmington, DE, and one an informal get together that drew about a half-dozen of us to Falls Church, Va., where one of us lived. I also wrote for the TAMR member newsletter, the HOTBOX.

I'd love to dig up some of those old articles. I find that the TAMR has a website, [update 12/5/2013: Not any more, at least not here -- its lease expired and now someone is squatting on the domain] so I've contacted the person listed there as "archivist" in the dim hope that there might be a way to recover some of them. [Oh, and nothing came of that, either...]

We'll see...[Well, hope does spring eternal...]

Track plans: 1.1

Reminiscing about that first, never-built layout inspired by the C.B. Baird photo, this morning I began sketching out various conceptions. I'm fairly confident that these were all iterations I considered when playing with that design.

The initial approach was the old standby "folded dogbone" design.

 

At the bottom was the focal-point station/yard. The spur on the upper level (center left in the drawing) would be for a mine. The railroad would curve around a prominent mountain--another scenic focal point. Stuff at the back was not thoroughly thought out, as I recall.

Then I read about the benefits of the so-called "twisted dogbone" and took another shot at it.

Same basic concept, except after trains passed the mine, they'd go along the back side instead of curving back around as in the original.

I'm pretty sure I tried designs that would hide some of the track to avoid the dreaded "spaghetti bowl" effect.

The downside on this design, though, is that it seemed to really cut back on the visual--fully half the mainline was hidden trackage.

So that might have led me back to the untwisted dogbone design, with only a short stretch of track being hidden.

It was probably at about this time that I realized that putting the layout on a screened-in back porch in temperate Pennsylvania wasn't the smartest idea. The big piece of plywood we'd put on sawhorses back there, which was going to be the base, was consigned to some other purpose. I went back to drawing fantasy layouts based on what I could do IF I could take over my dad's study. 

Track plans: 1

I wonder if I've set a record for unbuilt track plans.

I fell in love with model railroading in around 7th or 8th grade. We lived in a small house on a college campus, so space to build a railroad was a challenge, to say the least. That didn't stop me from attempting various designs, some of which got as far as benchwork.

One of the earliest model railroading articles I recall was a Model Railroader feature depicting a passenger train run on the Gorre and Daphetid, John Allen's great model railroad. With Allen's spectacular scenery, whimsical touches and stellar photography, the piece was absolutely amazing. Perhaps it set a standard so high that I was bound to be intimidated.

(Update: videos here, here, here, and here, all assembled from stills Allen shot himself, give a good look at the Allen layout.)

Allen's work was also included in one of the first model railroading books I read, Bill McClanahan's book on scenery. But another image that especially captured my attention was of a layout built by one C.B. Baird. No track plan, but from the image I was able to contrive a likely possibility of one, and soon I was envisioning it to be built on our screened in back porch.

Lately I've been thinking about that design again, and wondering if I might try to revive it. A Model Railroader story last year helped trigger that. I've tried to find the real plan, but to no avail. Still, from this video, I think that maybe I can get a pretty good idea of the design.

(Updated with additional links on 11/23/09

A new blog

"Dad," my son asked me the other day. "Is the model railroad something you're really going to do? Or is it just a fantasy."

Out of the mouths of babes...

I've been promising myself that this winter I really am going to move my model railroad from fantasy to reality. A few weeks ago we did a major cleaning of the basement space where I want to build it. Some things still have to be moved out, but I hope to advance the ball on that some more this weekend, or soon, anyway.

This blog is going to be a diary of the whole project.