I havent worked on my son’s layout in a long time, I have been draggin my feet, but this is the latest pics.
Its going to be a small Vermont town that has a tourist passenger service offered with a USRA 0-8-0 and of all things, a Santa Fe F7. My son, Nicholas really enjoys the Santa Fe so we run that, we are not picky about if its proper.
The year could be any year, things really dont change too much around here, and being a tourist company, they can run the steam even though its 2007.
I still have lots to do, more buildings, get that fence around the green to look right, get more trees planted including more trees at the Christmas tree farm. pumpkin patch, half harvested corn field. the time of the year is mid October so we will put out holloween decorations around the town.
It certainly has a “New England feel” to it. The covered bridge, the village and the cut are nice touches. One seldom sees cuts modeled so well. The sweeping curves look good and the track does not over power the scenery. Looks like a great tourist railroad for folks to enjoy the fall foliage!
I designed it quite a few years ago when nicholas was 2. he was using a 4x5 that used to slide out from under his bed. it was just track on a board with pait for grass and water. It took 3hrs to complete. I designed this before i leared of other layout designs possible. if i could start over, I would do an around the room design as i found it much easier to landscape a shelf layout that is only 1’ deep. oh well.
anyhow, the idea for this layout is as you see, a small town that will now have a police and fire station, although they really arnt nessecary, but Nicholas has asked for them, so i will put them in. those two brick buildings are the current stand in’s.
So the town has the church, a Dyna model kit, the school, a walthers cornerstone kit, and the yellow house will become the hardware/general store selling farming equipment, STIHL chainsaws, and other equipment for the quarry workers. There will be maybe 3 houses, one will be a 1/87th of our house as request of the wife. others will be of houses found around weathersfield VT where i grew up. I will have a grocery/general store modeled after the one in Lyme, NH where i work. just outside of town is the christmas tree farm run by the Johnson’s who work the farm outside of town. There will be a stone cutting building there at the end of the spur that curves into the quarry. its not built yet and will be based off the atlas lumber building. I will just have cut stone all over the place. the station is the ETRL kit, the engine house is 2 engine house kits put together to make it 12" long in order to accomodate the 4-6-2 K4 that the wife runs(if and when she does run trains). when my son told us that he likes diesel’s, the K4 hasent run since the engine house is very spac
The roads were done with paint just as the rest of the turf, I used brown paint, put it down thick, then I had this natural dirt that I picked up at a Train show, I sprinkled that over the paint, spread it around with a brush. before it dried, I took my junky hotwheels car and drove it around the roads and that caused the ruts in the road.
as far as operations, this layout is very limited. I think I will need to create a shelf layout to attach to this in order to get operations of any kind.
Don’t be so quick to condemn newbie layouts most of them are done by Kids the people who will later be us.
This layout is brilliant as you say but it is a father son combination.
I can just about remember my first proper layout and the best that could be said for my first layout is that the trains worked properly the rest was a semi organised disaster area
Thank you for the comments. The town is ok now, but it is missing quite a lot. The police station, fire station, grocery store, general store/hardware, and a few houses. I hope i can get it to all fit in. I want it to be a village and not too crowded.
Great work