They say the planning stages take a long time. Well, I have been kicking ideas around for at least 6 months about scale and era of my soon to be layout. It recently hit me to combine 2 hobbies into one.
My layout will encompass the time period of the American Civil War. I have read every book on the CW since a child and visited almost every battlefield in the US. I think this would be a great era to put into a train layout. I’m not looking to make this a display of battles and battlefields. I want to focus on the railroads themselves.
I like the area served between Richmond and Norfolk. Lots of wide open country and two cities different in that one is war torn and the other pretty untouched. I’m going to go N scale to take in all that great VA countryside.
Found alot of good material on the internet but finding CW era rolling stock and scenery has presented a little challange. If anyone has any good suggestions on where to look for hardware and additional information, it would truely be appreciated. BTW, this is my first layout of any size so I’m really starting to get antsy about starting. hehe
there was an interesting thread here just before the switch to the new forums about this subject , unfortunately i can’t find it . anyone have a working link to it ?
i found one manufacturer of civil war period equipment
http://www.btsrr.com/bts9507.htm
Thank you for the info. It seems they have other projects in the works so I guess I’ll keep checking back with them. Funny, I seem to find the locomotives of the period but no rolling stock. Guess I’m going to have to do some customizing.
welcome to the world of pre-USRA model railroading . you’ll find as you continue to research that there is a decent amount of equipment , structures etc. available but you’ll rarely see it in your LHS and most of it will be craftsman kits from tiny companies rather than RTR from big manufacturers .
i highly recommend “Narrow Guage and Short Line Gazette” magazine http://www.ngslgazette.com/
and the Early Rails yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EarlyRail/
one of these days i’m going to have to organize my bookmarks so i can find all these neat places easily [:)]
scenery for a CW era would be much similar to todays. Obviously telephone poles wouldn’t be present but depending on the year, telegraph poles could be represented. road would be dirt for the most part and very narrow ( by today standard) . Tree and shrubbery would be similar , maybe forest a bit bigger ( depending on the area. Fence in those days were an important way of marking boundary as well and holding back animals. small settlements would be best with a few miles in between them.
As far as building well it dependson your location. You could have everything for log house in the back country, to wood sidings to stone and earth and bricks for those big important buildings ( courthouse, town hall…etc). because youll be running steam take into consideration water supply for your engine, tender didnt hold as much as they did later in the steam era so it had to stop more often for water and coal. passenger service would also be a large part so plan your station accordingly with your water stops . the smaller town might only be a whistle stop .
i think this era of american history is very fertile and it should make for fascinating research and building. hope this helps