Often times we model railroaders try to imitate real life and even though the layouts are done superbly with great details the one thing that always struck me when looking at pictures or layout drawing are the industries that are stack on one after the other. Often times we have very little choice due to size constraints and we want more than just a single track doing a loop around our train room. A few days ago there is a great post showing a real life 18 inch curve equivalent around a grain silo in Portland, Oregon. I live in a suburb of Portland and I am familiar with that location and was very happy to see a real life imitating MRR. This got me to do some further research of the nearby area. I know from driving by some of the areas and looking at Google earth at the area in North Portland between the Columbia River and the Willamette River (it is pronounced Wa-Lamb-Et) looks like a model railroad layout. Today I took the time to zoom in on Google Maps to the point where it gives a birds eye view and really realized that this area’s industries had to be designed by a model rail roader. If you look here http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=45.619441,-122.755394&spn=0.052228,0.175095&z=13 and zoom in at that various spurs and loops you will find a great variety of industries all crammed together. There is
Eric,
Although not all specifically train-related, here’s a thread that contains pics of structures and buildings that could be modeled on a layout:
This Old Spot: A Modeler’s Visual Library
Tom
I sometimes refer to Switzerland as “The World’s Biggest Train Set.” Spectacular mountain scenery, everything tidy and neat, and the trains all run on time.
The inspiration for my figure 8 loop was a section of track that is called the “Big Ten Loop” near Coal Creek Canyon in Arvada, CO (near my house). It leads up to the mountains, from above it almost looks like a figure 8 loop.
Here is the Google maps location: map
