The Lehigh and New England railroad was the second major railroad to go out of business in the east after the NYO&W - suffering from the same problems that doomed Penn Central and it’s forbearers, namely miles of redundant trackage and a collapsing industrial base. The railroad was absorbed into Central of New Jersey in 1963 (which abandoned PA trackage to it’s arch rival the Lehigh Valley and in 1972 and was merged into Conrail in 1976.)
However, in 1949 the railroad was booming - a new fleet of Alco F and RS locomotives pounded the rails across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, delivering anthracite coal from the mountainous west to markets east, and the proliferous cement industry in the east to all over the state. At the same time as the black and white striped Alco behemoths roamed, venerable 2-8-2 and 2-8-0 steam locos still plied their trade. 2-10-0 helpers pushed heavy trains up Summit Hill and into the northern tip of the Appalachians. 0-8-0 saddlebacks rubbed shoulders with Alco S2’s in the Pen Argyl yard and roundhouse.
This is the timescale I choose to model - the transition era is frequently modelled, but I’m a big fan of F’s and RS’s , and this will give me an opportunity to run relatively smaller , more frequent trains and possibly fit in some steam-era infrastructure.
For this railroad I’m going to keep to the idea that knowing some is great, and knowing all is a big disadvantage. Namely I know that the main traffic was coal - but I don’t want to be too specific with maps, real track plans and all the assorted problems that that entails.
The biggest problem I see is the lack of a small yard for building and breaking down your trains. It also seems a small engine terminal of some sort would help. How much staging are you planning on?
Without those elements, you’re limited to trains entering, doing a little work and leaving again. As such, I think you have pretty limited yourself on how you will run your trains.
It might be worth it to re-think one of the corners to see if you can work in a 3-4 yard so you at least have a place to store rolling stock and originate your trains from.
WM - I figured that I don’t have the space for a large terminal or even a large town in the space I’ve got, so trying to shoe-horn them in would be a mistake. The staging tracks go around underneath - I’ve got more than enough room for 8-10 tracks each about 10’ long, but it would be only 5-6" below the underframe of the main level, so not really a visible yard.
I guess the layout is really limited to peddler freights and through freights, I didn’t really consider that…
Looks pretty nice. You have the track laid at an angle to the walls, which is a goodness. It makes the track look like it is going somewhere real rather than just following the walls. You could rearrange the trackage at the crossover on the lower side to permit continuous running on the surface. There are times you will enjoy just watching your train go around the room. It’s also useful for running in new equipment, and testing trains to make sure they always stay on the track.
How do you enter the layout? lift up or lift out section? a duck under, a swinging gate?
Have you considered adding a penisula into the center open section to gain more trackage? Maybe as a later addition?
How do you intend to do the backdrop? Masonite? Sheet Stryene? Just paint the backdrop onto the walls? No backdrop?
Two very big positives come to mind with your plan:
You’ve got an excellent scenerey-to-track ratio… Many guys (myself included) would try to stuff twice as much N scale track into 11x7. Yours will look much more realistic and capture the remoteness of L&NE country in NE PA.
By ruling out continuous run, you ensure that you must operate realistically. For me, I’d still have the continuous run for breaking in locos and for non-MR guests, but that’s just me.
But I have to agree with Lee. Without some sort of staging or a yard, there’s no place for trains to come from or end up. Not long after I finished my door layout I recognized the same limitation, and so I built an add-on 3-track staging yard.
I love this paragraph because it perfectly expresses my philosophy. I’ve said it another way. Ignorance is bliss. My railroad is freelanced but I tried to design and operate it as realistically as possibility. At the same time, anything that I don’t know is unrealistic, isn’t. This hobby is about creating illusions and if I can fool myself, it works.
My first thought when I looked at the plan was that you had no yards but a closer look showed the mainline disappearing into a lower level staging yard. My only concern is that it seems to show your mainline crossing itself in an over-under fashion just before the east and west entrances to the staging yard. That will increase the grade required to get the upper level track down to the staging yard. Have you worked out the steepness of that grade and could you make those two tracks cross each other at grade.
I like that you have kept the plan fairly simple and have a mix of trailing and facing point spurs no matter the direction the train is traveling. This should provide some interesting operation. Too many modelers try to cram to much into a small space and their mainlines end up looking more like an amusement park ride than a railroad.
I like your choice of prototype as well. My freelanced railroad is set in 1956 and is a composite of a number of railroads in the northern New Jersey, southern New York region, primarily the NYOW, Erie, and DLW. I too have a fondness for late steam, F and RS units. I was aware of the LNE but I have not studied it much. Perhaps I should as it might give me some fresh ideas for operations.
Actually, the LNE was not done in for the same reasons as the O&W. A great read on this the book “Death of a Great Company.” The LNE made money through most of the 1950’s and was screwed by Wall Street in what we now call a junk bond deal.
Had the investment world not killed it, it would have made it a lot longer. How long? Who knows. Maybe until the Poughkeepsie Bridge burned and cost the Maybrook connection?
