I was cleaning out a box of stuff in the crawl space to get to the Christmas tree, and I found a bunch of photos of an old layout I built. I did not know I still had these.
.
This is the last N scale layout that I built. It was built with the help of my friend Randy, and we called it the “Norfolk Stratton” combining the names of his favorite prototype and my STRATTON & GILLETTE.
.
It is a portable layout that was built for the Scale Rails of Southwest Florida to use in train shows. I believe it was built in 1992, so these pictures are 25 years old!
.
.
.
.
.
It was great to find all these old pictures of N scale SGRR equipment. What a bunch of memories these brought back.
.
I even have photographs of the two best bridges I ever built.
.
.
.
The layout broke down into four sections 30 inches by 8 feet. It fit into a custom wooden transport box that fit into the bed of my F-150.
Nice! Your wood trestle looks great, and the transport box idea, excellent. Looks like I see radius sections, did this make an oval for continuous running? or return loops? Looks like some of it was two levels.
Thank you for the comments on my trestle bridge. Assembly jigs made it really quite easy.
.
There were two loops that ran through all four sections, but they were only visible in three. The section with the trestle hid the staging tracks for the main loops, and had tow independent loops on that module.
.
Two of the other modules also had independent loop tracks, and one was a switching module. Six trains ran at once on individual loops, but rarely was more than one train visible. We also had three staging tracks for each loop, so we could switch out trains quickly to keep the scenes alive.
.
It was a real crowd pleaser. I have no idea whatever fianlly became of it.
Somewhere over my life, I managed to lose apparently every single photo of all the layouts I built or had around since I was a kid. Most would have been Polaroids, some of the later ones perhaps on a 110 or a Disc camera.
About a year ago I demolished the last N scale layout I ever built - it hd been sitting in the basement for some 35+ years. After it was all hauled out to the dumpster, I found one of the Chooch tunnel portals on the floor and saved it. The one and only item I have from that particular period.
