I acquired a copy of MR’s December 1987 issue and have a few questions about the article on this layout.
1 - The closer map on page 91 at Sunrise has a partial line to Mountain Grove then no showing of the connection to the V&O. How does the V&O connection fit into the map?
2 - The layout drawing on page 92 has near Sunrise track for the Sawmill Run and Back Creek Subdivisions. From the article, I gather Sawmill run is just a few logging camps but what is on the Back Creek line?
3 - Are all locations on the AM and V&O real? I once tried using Mapquest to locate some of the town names, found Afton but Kingswood Jct. was somewhere else and most of the others never came up.
Hello “storknest,” 1. Two red line segments were omitted on that 1987 map. it should show a direct connection between Sunrise and Jimtown on the V&O, and a connection through Mountain Grove to the V&O at Kingswood Junction. See the map on page 69 of the March 1993 “Model Railroader.” 2. Tony Koester never developed the Back Creek Subdivision beyond what you see on that track plan. It was simply used for visible staging and as a yard lead. You’d have to ask Tony (write to him in care of MR) what notional industries the line was supposed to serve. 3. The Allegheny Midland and Allen McClelland’s Virginian & Ohio are both freelanced model railroads. Similarities between the model railroad place names and actual places are intentional, to reinforce the sense of locale, but most of them are fictitious. See Tony’s article, “The Midland Road moves coal,” in the February 1997 MR, for the most up-to-date track plan of the AM’s Appalachia Division (main layout), and the June 1998 MR for the track plan of the AM’s Coal Fork Extension, the coal branch Tony added in the adjacent family room/crew lounge. Shortly after completing the Coal Fork Extension, Tony decided to dismantle the AM and model the Nickel Plate Road’s St. Louis line, and that’s his current layout. So long, Andy
I remember in a column in MR ages ago Tony Koester said he did use actual names of places from a map. However the places on his layout were not necessarily as they appeared in reality. The example he gave was of some town called Gap Run. The real Gap Run is little more than a creek or something but the one on his layout had a small depot probably to suggest that there is a rest of the town somewhere beyond the modelled portion of the layout.
Sperandeo and dirtyd79, thanks for the replies. I currently can only afford to do V-scale (virtual) modeling and was thinking at some point of making part of the AM so the info helps.
I had a chance to drive through West Virginia and Virginia during my vacation this year. If you want to create a “typical” AM scene, do likewise. Get into the middle of WV and leave the interstate. Take photos of anything interesting (such as the small towns just beyond the gas station).
It’s the ambiance, not exactly copying every last detail.
Thanks but I am not up to that step yet. The way the program I’m using works (TRS2004), I first do terrain, either all “by hand” making my own hills, rivers, etc. or I can get data from certain site and using a couple of free programs convert it into terrain files so the hills, rivers, mountains, elevations are already done. That is why I am trying to figure out how the AM fit into a real map, if I know where it went, I can get the data I need for those areas and easily make the terrain files instead of making all the elevations individually.
It is kinda like reverse prototype model railroading, where a modeler would take the prototype and simulate it in modeling, I am taking a model and trying to “make the prototype.”