My favorite is the Brandywine Transit series. It covers eastern lines based loosely on the lehigh valley transit and/or Philadelhia & Western. It featured multiple city routes, a terminal, and and interchange with an interurban.
I also enjoyed the articles by Bruce Goehman on his Midland Electric because as a freelance, it was very credible, featured a mix of operational elements (rural, urban, interurban) and the modeling was very well done.
Paul F.
Northern NJ
My favorite Traction layout was called the Crooked Mountain lines ina book called model railroad encyclopedia.[8D]
The Brandywine was/is my favorite as it was the first I’ve read of modeling traction. Since then I’ve always wanted to include a trolley or interurban on a layout.
I believe the Crooked Mountain lines was featured in several articles in MRR way back when.
Crooked mountyain lines was great
O scale two rail with scratchbuilt equipment and structures…
Brandywine Transit was by far the best. It also included structures that could be built with great instructions,I still own the original copies of these issues.
To all Bob Hegge fans (Crooked Mountain Lines), I apologize for this ommission! I loved that series, too and can’t believe that I forgot to include it in the poll.
Here is at least one reference that I found for MR over the years…“Closeup: The Crooked Mountain Lines.” Model Railroader December 1976
I was surprised when he clipped all the catenary and replaced it with outside, overrunning third rail. Also, I liked the article about the large, four trucked, box motor that was modelled along the lines of the larger Piedmont & Northern motors.
Paul F.
Northern NJ
I voted for the Brandywine because it was the one the first year of my Model Railroading subscription. At the time I couldn’t believe they put that railcar on the front of a model railroading magazine! It wasn’t until some years later I learned that they actually made freight locomotives that ran on interurbans.
Tough call between Brandywine and O’Dell, as both are nice little layouts (it’s nice that both were project layouts that were considerably smaller than 4x8!) but the O’Dell articles included quite a bit on how to work with Orr girder rail. The plans for structures and the controller for the Brandywine layout were nice, though.
Electric railroading, whether in the form of streetcars, interurbans or electric freight, is also a part of model railroading. It’s interesting stuff and ideal for tight spaces.
Of the ones on your list, I like the Brandywine best. But my favorite is the Crooked Mountain Lines.
Enjoy
Paul
While the Crooked Mountain Lines had many beautiful Mountain scenes and fantastic rolling stock, the trackplan was terrible. The layout had almost no industries within the switchback layout. Some stations were about 3 feet apart. Operation must have been difficult. 100% for beauty, 5% for operation potential.