OK, so I have a 30" by 48" layout on extruded pink foam. I chose this dimension because I can fit this in my car, and it’s the same size as the Terrain for Trains N scale layouts.
I’m making some serious progress on my layout as far as buildings, streetlights, and some scenery go. I need YOUR help though.
First of all, this is me and my son.
Now, I need your help in determining what should go here:
Here:
and here:
My goals for this layout include:
1.) Portability.
2.) Must have trucking industry.
3.) Small town.
4.) Some switching potential.
5.) Durable when portable.
6.) Lifelike buildings, lights, and town.
I am setting this small layout in the early '90’s, in the Northeast somewhere in the summer. I know that is a lot of space to cover, but oh well.
This seems to be an older neighborhood, with some mixed commercial and light industrial businesses. Quite plausible, really, for an older Northeastern city; places like that still survive today.
The spur behind the commercial buildings seems ideal for a large street-fronting warehouse, perhaps for produce or appliances. Cars would be delivered right into the building. This would be an older structure, similar in era to the others on the street, but could quite possibly have been covered with ugly sheet tin somewhere along the line. This tends to look horrendous in real life but strangely interesting in model form.
The two spurs by the U-Store could be for a lumberyard. The shorter spur could be for unloading roof trusses. A coal dealer would also be a possibility, and not a few lumber yards did both. There still are coal dealers, too.
The plot without rail service could be anything. It could be a vacant lot littered with refrigerators, but that would be an eyesore. I would clear it off, flatten it, and put a nice sparkly Butler building up, and make it an electronics plant or tool shop. This new building would set off your older ones nicely. Another thing I’d expect to see in such an area is a self-serve hose-type car wash or a gas station with facilities for big trucks, perhaps attached to a small oil dealer.
Track plan is a double track mainline to allow for two trains to run at the same time. It’s based on Soo Line’s Red Wing Division from the December issue of MR 1994 I believe.
Right now, I have no track industries. That’s why I’m open to suggestions.
For the first space, I was thinking of a relatively thin kitbashed building with sides from DPM. A boxcar or whatever would be rolled right into the building. It could have a store front, or at least a door that faces the road.
Autobus prime: I was thinking the same thing about the building with the lone spur. Thanks for confirming that. I’ll have to check out the local hobby shop tonight. I want something relatively big, but not overwhelming.
As far the two industrial spurs, would a lumber yard work within the confines of a small town like that? Being right across the street from shops, stores, and businesses?
For the empty space with no rail service, I was thinking of a small gas station, or even a scratchbuilt parking garage, two or three levels. There would be enough parking to handle the businesses across the street too.
The top one has such little space avaialbel I don’t reccomend a building. I think you could either make it a scrap dealer with a small office and couple of clamshell cranes to move scrap or a railroad owned team track for people to unload ther shipments who don’t have a siding. There was one in Alsip Illinois on the IHB at 127th Street where a brick dealer got loads of bricks and stones in box cars for years. Sometimes there were major pieces of equipment off loaded there. A couple of days before they were due a big crane would be parked there waiting for the delivery
Thanks for the recommendation, however, I think that would not be a good idea. I need something that would be relatively done indoors. That’s because on the side of the building with the yellow trim, I plan on having an outdoor cafe or table sof some sort, and a brick yard or trash yard would not hold up too well with the local residents!
I think the gas station would be a better idea with more potential for interesting detail. A parking garage could be a neat model, but you’d spend a lot of time building it and a lot of money populating it with cars it would do a good job hiding. If you want a car park, you might make a ground-level one, which would just be a parking lot with a guard booth. This would be a good placeholder, too.
How about a classic steel diner in slightly run-down but still operating condition? You see these a lot in neighborhoods like that.
I think a lumberyard would fit pretty well here. The impression I get is of a mixed industrial-commercial area “down by the tracks” in some moderately large Midwestern town. That street is probably called Railroad Street or Wabash Street or something similar, and Main Street with the Presbyterian church, city hall, and ugly CVS drugstore built on the former site of the elegant railroad station, is a few blocks that-a-way. Lumber is probably a better fit than a cafe, although if the town is big enough, or a big city is close enough, this could be an early appearance of the gentrifiers. (%$&* yuppies turned my hometown into wall-to-wall antique shops!)
You could keep this in mind when selecting names for the other businesses. I’d expect to see plumbing and e
That I do not know. I’d suggest a look at the Walthers catalog. If you have to, it would be a pretty easy scratch project, and you could follow some regional brand for added fun. Nonfan visitors love that stuff.
How about a newspaper? Carloads of newsprint in, empties out. Semi-trailers of inserts (those glossy Target, Kmart, Macy’s ads) coming in. Newspaper delivery trucks going out. You can even have a recycling truck show up to pick up the recyclable paper and aluminum from the used printing plates. And don’t forget that if it is a big newspaper the ink comes in via tanker truck or you may be able to get away with a tank car.
Newspapers that receive their newsprint by rail typically have an indoor bay for unloading the rail cars. The newspaper that I work for has a spur off the mainline with two holding tracks - one for loaded cars and one for empties. Norfolk Southern spots the loaded cars on our siding and picks up the empties. Our Trackmobile then takes over and moves the cars around the production plant. The indoor track in our newsprint warehouse holds three or four 50’ cars.
And in case anyone was wondering, yes, the Trackmobile does have enough power (and momentum from the weight of the car) to push a car off the end of the track and through the back wall of the warehouse.
For the first spot, I will be making a newspaper building. Not sure of the logistics of the railroad and vehicle integration, but I have to first decide on what the building will look like. I’ll name the building after the person who suggested it.
For the second spot, I like the gas station idea. I’m hoping to name the general store at the gas station after the person who suggested it.
Newspapers typically have newsprint coming in on one side of a printing plant building by rail or truck and newspapers coming off the presses on another side at the loading dock. The bigger the newspaper, the greater the number of dock doors for both incoming supplies and outgoing newspapers.
At the printing plant for my papers, The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, we have at least a dozen docks for out going newspapers that are loaded on semi’s and delivered to distribution centers. The newsprint warehouse has room for three or four 50’ newsprint cars. We also have another set of docks, probably another dozen, that are used to bring in the Sunday glossy inserts to be inserted. We currently pubish somewhere around 500,000 newspapers daily and around 700,000 on Sunday so we have a big plant.
Smaller newspapers still have the same plant functionality but on a smaller scale.
I’m at the plant as we speak but don’t have my camera with me. I can stop by in the next day or two and take some photos around the plant for you if you’d like. That will also motivate me to document and write an article for Model Railroader, something that I’ve wanted to do for a while now.
