I changed my mind and am going with my Great Lakes and Atlantic Railroad Idea.
Odd that you should mention the Maine Central Mountain Division. Herron Rail Video has a nice tape or DVD of the MEC Mountain Divison of about 1950. It includes some nice footage of B&M’s summer season train, the Mountaineer. I don’t know if the video is available in PAL format, however.
Since I spend about 6 months a year in Maine, I’d be glad to correspond with you.
Andre
James,
I just looked over your web site and I really like what you’re up to. If you have need of any New England information please let me know. I was going to reference the book “Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn” when I saw you already had found it! I also like how you took the N&W plan and expanded it a bit.
My railroad is also somewhat free-lanced. After getting sick and tired of trying to cram the real world in my way too small space I finally decided to model a prototype railroad(s) – in my case the Central Vermont with a little B&M and Maine Central thrown in – with fictional towns and track routings.
I started by creating a list of “signature elements” for a theme of New England railroading in the 1950s – things like a paper mill, village, shallow rocky streams, and covered bridges – not to mention “mixed bag” passenger trains and milk cars and creameries. Then the layout design process was a much simpler matter of fitting all those pieces of the puzzle in place in a visually interesting and appealing manner.
Much more enjoyable – to me anyway – than simply trying to take track maps and cram all the lines into my space.
Take care,
Marty McGuirk
Marty,
How IS your railroad coming? The last I heard of it was in Model Railroad Planning 2000.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (I still haven’t figured which), I also seem to have been bitten by the New England bug. What makes that so excruciatingly painful is that I’m a Californian and a SP/Santa Fe fan by natural inclination. However, I’ve been drawn to the MEC Mountain Division ever since I bought Herron Rail Videos’ tape on the subject.
My wife and I have started spending 6 months of the year out here in rural Maine and we just acquired a nice basement with some kind of structure on top of it to keep the rain out.
Andre,
The new layout (the layout in MRP was torn down when we moved to Colorado) is finally approaching a stage when it can be shown publicly without too much embarrassment. In fact, I’m been finishing up some trees and ballast this last week and hope to be able to get enough done to send in a Trackside Photo or two to MR.
Marty
Sounds like a neat layout, hopefully we’ll be seeing this in MR soon.
Dougal,
I just realized there is a photo of my new layout in the next MR (we just got our advance copy yesterday) – look at the picture of the Stafford General Store in the YesterYear Models ad. I took that on my new layout – although the building is only in a temporary “photo” spot in that particular view.
Marty
Marty,
Sounds like you kinda gave up on the Southern New England RR idea and moved north a bit. I look forward to seeing photos of your new layout and hopefully a track plan as well. In a truly perfect world, an article on your layout would include some pungent comments by Iain Rice, if only to complain that your move to Colorado means that his flying time is increased by an additional 2 hours. [;)]
I hope you took the full course of anti-narrow gauge shots before you moved. I understand that the narrow gauge bug bites hard and that SGDD (Standard Gauge Deficiency Disorder) is incurable, although some palliative measures have been shown to relieve a few of the lesser symptoms.
Andre
Andre,
Iain had little, if anything to do with the design of the present layout – he was busy with other issues at the time I planned the thing – although he certainly looked the plan over and we went back and forth on some issues it wasn’t really as much of a collaboration as the old SNE layout was.
The new layout has a lot of elements from various parts of New England, although so far everything is meshing fairly well – even to my eye. Most all of the equipment will be CV (with some B&M here and there), and I can’t resist MEC Harvest Green and Yellow, though that stuff stays on the shelf until no one else is around to see me watching it run around the layout.
Seriously, the layout will be something like Paul Dolkos’ B&M – a compilation of scenes and elements from various places arranged in what I hope will be a logical and appealing manner.
I haven’t been completely immune from narrow gauge, and have done some narrow gauge modeling (Sn3) since I moved out here – another reason for the apparent slow rise of the New England layout. I decided that an Sn3 module was fine, and I didn’t need to fill the basement with an Sn3 layout when there were boxes of my pet HO New England models (and lots of detailed and finished freight cars) in the store room.
I think Andy S was a little disppointed though – he kept offering to give my resin freight cars a good home . . . .
Thanks guys for your kind words about my sadly spacially challenged bit of “New England”.
Is this a new tape/DVD or has it been around for a while? I’d really like to get my hands on that (NTSC tapes are not a problem for me my VCR can handle it[:D])
I got the New England bug when my wife and I vacationed there a couple of years ago, I remeber standing at Crawford’s Notch Depot and thinking - great scenery, this would make a great model railroad - if only I had the space …
Marty,
If you don’t mind my asking, what convinced you to give up the SNE idea? From what you wrote in MRP 2000, the SNE concept did seem to satisfy your desire for CV based modeling without the limitation of a strict adherence to CV prototype.
You could do a lot worse than having a layout similar in concept to Dolkos’s B&M. Two of the most tattered and dog-eared issues of MR I have are December, 1995 and April, 2000. I particularly liked his "Work
James,
I got the video about 2 years ago. Herron does sell some PAL format videos through Steam Powered Video in the UK. The MEC Mountain Division video tape is stock number 017 and the DVD is stock number 017D. Herron’s web site is at http://www.herronrail.com. I’ll warn you that the picture quality is only adequate since the original film was shot by an amateur. The sound dubbing is quite good, except in one or two spots. I think you can glean a lot of modeling information from it. I certainly enjoy it every time I watch it.
How long have you been a member of the Alton MRG? I was at an exhibition in Alton a few years ago when we were visiting the UK. I also took a ride on the Mid-Hants at the same time. The last time I was in the UK (2002), I went on an excursion behind the “Princess Elizabeth” (class 47 London Paddington to Bristol, the “Lizzie” from Bristol to Plymouth). I’ll say one thing for you British. When you run a mainline steam excursion, you do it with style and class.
Andre
P.S. I’m writing this only 20 miles away from wher