The Geneva Southern Railroad was originally established to compete with steam boats on Lake Seneca in Upstate New York. Initially built south from Geneva New York to Ithaca, between Lakes Seneca and Oneida, the road expanded north to Rochester, and south through Binghampton to Scranton, Pa. Eventually , Geneva Southern built south to the Philadelphia area.
The railroad is basically an anthracite carrier. Set in the early 50s, the modeled portion is a branch line which serves alarge coal mine complex at Delaney, and another at Cross Notch (both unmodeledl), a small mine at Beekman and several industries at the end of track at Albermaryl. All locations on the modeled portion are fictional.
I also model railroads in the eastern PA area and one thing to remember is that by the 1950’s, anthracite coal is in a death spiral. PA anthracite production peaked in the 1920’s at 100 million tons a year, it was at about 40 million by 1950 and 20million by 1960. I model 1900-1905 and my era hauled more tonnage than your 1950 era will haul (in 20-25 ton cap cars I might add).
Your mines will be running at about 1/2 speed in the early 1950’s and rust and decay will be taking hold. Don’t be afraid to hold back on the weathering.
The nice thing about freelancing a model railroad through a real-world setting is that the scenery decisions have already been made for you. Still, the specifics of car choice and locomotive choice/colors aren’t locked into any single prototype.
As Brother Husman wrote, in your era anthracite was a dying industry. At about the same time, Delaware and Hudson had some success converting itself from an anthracite carrier to a bridge route. You might include that in your background.
I have found that my proto-lanced layout has given me quite a bit of focus toward the design and construction of the layout without restricting my creative side. My prototype is the Santa Ana & Newport (SA&N) located in Orange County, California. This line operated independently for only a few years and despite a deal made to sell out to the Santa Fe (AT&SF), it fell into the hands of the Southern Pacific (SP) around the turn of the 20th century. The complete SA&N history gives credence to the phrase, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Track extensions needed to connect the existing SA&N lines to the SP main created a prototypical loop around the north half of Orange County. The more I looked at this fallen flag, the more I wanted to base my layout on it.
Although I don’t have enough room to model the entire loop, my layout does include portions of Santa Ana, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa (areas I’ve known since I was a kid). Although I’m not trying to model exact duplicates of these areas on the layout (not enough info is available for my 1950’s time period), modeling feature industries and/or recognizable features from these areas allows visitors to recognize the locations I’ve modeled. Since so much has changed in the area since the 1950’s, I am pretty much free to model whatever features/structures/scenes I choose. Few, if any, layout visitors would know the difference anyway. For instance, my Costa Mesa scene includes scratch built models of several surviving structures but I did not try to place them in their exact protoype locations. As I said, the proto-lance focus has allowed me to plan and execute scenes more easily than if I was just making the whole thing up.