Although my military retirement is still many years off, and until then I have to be satisfied with my current small layout, I enjoy thinking about the “big one.” By big I mean what most of you HO types would consider maybe medium (12x12-ish…).
You good folks have seen some of my ideas about modeling specific segments of the PRR using real track diagrams as inspiration. So far, all have had drawbacks. The Pennsy is just too darned big! I didn’t think I could add enough staging (and trains) to support the 4-track mainline. I considered the Buffalo line, but I wasn’t sure it was my cup of tea.
So I considered modeling a branch, like the Bald Eagle branch or the Clearfield coal branches, or maybe even the Northern Central branch through southern PA/northern MD. But all had limitations, either from the standpoint of sameness of traffic (all coal) to no passenger trains, to requiring locomotives (I1s 2-10-0s) that aren’t available commercially in N. After building my H10s 2-8-0, I think I’m done with kitbashing steam for awhile.
Then I realized that what I’m doing now, modeling a fictional segment of the PRR’s Middle Division, is very satisfying. No one can nail me down and say “They never ran that locomotive on that coal branch” because it didn’t really exist. But it could have. So, I propose to do the same on a larger scale.
I have in mind double track mainline representing Pennsy or Penn Central/Conrail/Amtrak (depending on which era I want to run) with a city scene, a country/mountain scene, and a coal mining scene. I’d like to even add a stretch of track with overhead catenary for my GG1. This way I can capture the feel of the Pennsy without trying to do justice to individual scenes (such as the massive Altoona shops, Enola Yard, the Rockville Bridge, Horseshoe Curve, and the 4-track main).
As I found myself going deeper and deeper toward rivet-countin
I considered my retirement project, L.A. circa 1940, UP, SF, SP and PE, from Long Beach to Downtown, east to San Bernardino, south to Fullerton, and west to Santa Barbara, North to Pasadena. Even came up with a way to connect the Cajon Canyon section to hook back up with the Gaviota section at Santa Barbara, even drew up a plan that looked like an enormous E.
Trouble was that even with alot of selective compression, I would need a 40’ x 60’ warehouse to build it.[:O][^]Oh Well…
I really looked at modeling several actual areas the Milwaukee Road. What I finally did was model an area of SW Wisconsin and extended an existing Milw brand all the way to Dubuque, IA. The towns are based on Milw practice, and have the ‘feel’ of Milw branch lines in the 50’s. One visitor looked at my HO town of Pecatonica and swore he had been there, and is was a great copy(Pecatonica is in Illinois, just to the south). I took this as a great complement!
I am very satisfied how thing came out, and I do not have lingering issues with the normal compromise of trying to ‘shoe horn’ a town into a space that is not right or the ‘fit’ is no good. As you mentioned, many of the ‘neat’ branches did not have enough traffic or passenger operation in later years. I have 2 through passenger trains, and a Gas Electric run on my ‘Pecatonica Division’, and enough freight to justify it’s existance. I am even looking at adding a APB signal system in the future(I have an interest in signals) - Something that a line like this would usually not have. I have basically upgraded a branch line into a through route to justify more traffic. A prototypical ‘What If’ layout gets rid of the ‘they never ran that class of engine there’ or ‘that is nice, but they tore out that crossover before that paint scheme was invented…’ stuff.
Dave,I ran into the same problem with the C&O and Chessie and now NS…So,my solution is a generic industrial switching layout or when I had the room a generic branch line that I could easily use for the C&O,Chessie(C&O),NS,C&HV,HR or any of my short line engines…
Now to model a prototypical area of (say) the C&O I would choose a real C&O branch line that fits my needs.The same can be done for any railroad.
Yes , my SP is way too large to model, I chose the Sunset line route, narrowing it down to the Lordsburg sub, and then devised a ficticious town , so I could fiddle with protolancing the layout. I grew up in that area ( EL Paso Tx. ) modeling it is just a trip to the past for me. It works for me, I can still model SP prototypes in my own little world.
Protolancing is probably the best of both worlds. You have the freedom to do things the way you want them done, within reasonable paramters, yet you have the convenience of using factory painted locos and rolling stock. I designed my layout as a purely freelanced railroad that would interchange with real railroads in real places (off the layout). The drawback for me is that my poor skills with an airbrush and the difficulty and/or expense of getting quality decals made me realize I could never paint my equipment anywhere near as sharply as what is available commercially. As a result, I am running more NYC equipment on my layout then I originally intended under the premise that they have leased power to my railroad and also have negotiated trackage rights over my line. I have even rewritten the history of my railroad to make it a takeover target of the NYC. It has become my version of protolancing.
Hemi-semi-demi protolancing for me. [:D] I tow NYC heavyweights with a Duplex over a trestle and hinterland that would be right at home in Nevada. Shhh!..wait…nope, no sirens. I guess I’m safe from the modelling police for another day.
Seriously, when you think about it, if your first intent is to model a place, you are never likely to be satisfied with the outcome. You almost certainly doom yourself to rolling the rock up the hill, only to have it overcome you and return itself well away from the base of the slope. Even a pasted extended photo of the area will not look believable.
I enjoyed modelling Horseshoe Curve, a tiny 100 yards of it. It turned out well, by my own admission, but I did it for my own enjoyment as an experiment. I don’t intend to do something like that again. There are so many variables that can intervene that modelling a scale mile must take a lifetime. If that is your dream, I sincerely hope you succeed. Some of us should, after all.
With free and proto-lancing, what you create merely has to be believable and please the eye. If the terrain rings a bell, and the rolling stock and structures too, then the rest is merely an exercise in creativity and self-fulfillment. To me, these last two are what model railroading are all about.
If I allowed myself to become a full-fledged prototype modeler, I’d probably never get anything done. With each purchase I’ve made, whether it be locomotive, rolling stock or structure, I’ve agonized over whether it would be appropriate for my Pottsville 1950-ish Reading RR layout (also throwing in some Pennsy for variety). For me it’s not necessarily a matter of prototype size but availability of stuff.
A good example (and this is ironic) is my choice for the RDG passenger station that once stood in Pottsville - Vollmer Neuffen Station. It’s far from a replica but it’s the only model I‘ve found that has many of the architectural features of the prototype. I was reluctant to buy this kit but seeing it at a show and realizing it was out of production, it quickly became “close enough.” I finished it last night and it’s actually a decent stand-in for the real thing.
No one will ever say that my (in progress) layout is an accurate prototype, but everyone will recognize many of the structures and scenes depicted.
I have no problem relating to your situation, since I’m paddling the same canoe.
My choice of prototype was pretty well made by my interest in modeling one area of Japan in a rather tight time frame, but there was never a chance that I could model the facilities of that prototype. Even with selective compression, the comparatively minor station that hosts my favorite 30 inch gauge logging line would easily overfill my garage in HOj. So I started with the prototype’s timetable, then cut, folded and stapled the facilities of the prototype - after which, I renamed the river and the various stations to protect the guilty. I’ve been working within that framework ever since (42+ years now,) and I’m reasonably happy with it.
OTOH, I’m a frustrated inventor, so I added a completely freelance coal hauler (in an area where there were no prototype coal mines) that could absorb my flights of fancy. That line is now home to some wierd and wonderful rolling stock, the like of which was never seen in Japan or anywhere else. Having scratched that itch, my cup runneth over.
Now, finally, post military retirement, post civilian retirement, I finally have a space big enough to at least come within reaching range of my long-time layout building dream. [:)][:)][tup]
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - sort of)
To start, [#ditto] the prior message: Thank you for your service to our country.
You might want to consider some scenes from the ‘Panhandle’ RR in eastern Ohio. This offers you mountain/hills, nearby cities (Wheeling WV or Columbus OH), coal mines, and a double-track main (Pittsburgh-Columbus). You could say the interurbans or city trolleys survived if you want some live caternary in Ohio.
Freight variety and passenger trains are easily available since the Panhandle went from St Louis to Pittsburgh and almost anything could be passing through your particular scene.
You might consider modeling the PRR’s “Port Road”. This is a single track (with passing sidings) electricified (until Conrail stopped running electrics) “short cut” from the NEC to Harrisburg’s Enola yard. It cuts off the PRR NEC Main at Perryville MD, and follows the Susquehanna River to Columbia PA were the Atglen and Susquehanna another PRR secondary route joins it before it crosses the Susquehanna to enter Enola yard.
The scenery is rual and the towns, such as they are are small - the largest being Columbia PA.
There is not a lot of on line switching (what there is would be in Columbia). You could even build it without any visible yard if you wanted to. Or if you felt the need to have a yard to shuffle cars in you could model a small portion of Enola.
Like all Pennsy lines this one carried coal, but also saw pigs and general freight. In the Amtrak era it also saw occasional passenger traffic. You can use your modelers license to adjust the traffic to your taste.
For motive power, just about anything that ran on the Pennsy could be found on the Port Road and since it is electrified it could run GG1s P5s and the like.
If you google PRR Port Road you’ll get a good deal of info on it.
I’m familiar with the Port Road. The only issue there is that it’s exclusively electric in my era (very few diesels and no steam), so I would need a fleet of GG1s and P5as… There’s only the deep-flanged Arnold GG1 and NO P5a in N scale. I could kitbash a Kato JNR boxcab electric to look like a PRR FF2, but FF2s never strayed from the Trenton Cutoff or the mainlineas far as Parkesburg.
Actually, when I was thinking of modeling it it was the early 80s (thats when I did most of my railfanning there) and you could see just about anything on it! As I am from that area, I am also a fan for the 3 foot Lancaster Oxford and Southern that used to interchange with the Columbia and Port Deposit at Peach Bottom.
My Rio Grande Yuba River Sub allows me to run Rio Grande big steam (my favorite) through the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California (where I grew up) and have the best of both worlds. It takes a little ‘historical tweaking’ to proto-lance, but you can always come up with a story (or excuse) as to how the railroad got there in the first place. And since it IS California, it also allows me to have trackage rights for SP and WP (the Yuba River Sub runs midway between Donner Pass and the Feather River Canyon), in case Donner’s closed by a snowslide or the Feather River is closed by a landslide.
It also allows me to re-create scenes that I remember from growing up in the Sierra’s, so that even though the railroad is ficticious, the country it goes through isn’t.
And people have told me that it LOOKS like the Rio Grande. Makes me a happy camper, it does.
Although my military retirement is still many years off, and until then I have to be satisfied with my current small layout, I enjoy thinking about the “big one.” By big I mean what most of you HO types would consider maybe medium (12x12-ish…).
You good folks have seen some of my ideas about modeling specific segments of the PRR using real track diagrams as inspiration. So far, all have had drawbacks. The Pennsy is just too darned big! I didn’t think I could add enough staging (and trains) to support the 4-track mainline. I considered the Buffalo line, but I wasn’t sure it was my cup of tea.
So I considered modeling a branch, like the Bald Eagle branch or the Clearfield coal branches, or maybe even the Northern Central branch through southern PA/northern MD. But all had limitations, either from the standpoint of sameness of traffic (all coal) to no passenger trains, to requiring locomotives (I1s 2-10-0s) that aren’t available commercially in N. After building my H10s 2-8-0, I think I’m done with kitbashing steam for awhile.
Then I realized that what I’m doing now, modeling a fictional segment of the PRR’s Middle Division, is very satisfying. No one can nail me down and say “They never ran that locomotive on that coal branch” because it didn’t really exist. But it could have. So, I propose to do the same on a larger scale.
I have in mind double track mainline representing Pennsy or Penn Central/Conrail/Amtrak (depending on which era I want to run) with a city scene, a country/mountain scene, and a coal mining scene. I’d like to even add a stretch of track with overhead catenary for my GG1. This way I can capture the feel of the Pennsy without trying to do justice to individual scenes (such as the massive Altoona shops, Enola Yard, the Rockville Bridge, Horseshoe Curve, and the 4-track main).
I always felt like proto-lancing is the way to go. Not so much because I didn’t want the challenge of trying to recreate something as it looked at a particular point in time but because it just felt a little more like it was my layout. A way of making it a little more personal. I model conrail in a fictitious town just outside of Pittsburgh, PA.
Although my military retirement is still many years off, and until then I have to be satisfied with my current small layout, I enjoy thinking about the “big one.” By big I mean what most of you HO types would consider maybe medium (12x12-ish…).
You good folks have seen some of my ideas about modeling specific segments of the PRR using real track diagrams as inspiration. So far, all have had drawbacks. The Pennsy is just too darned big! I didn’t think I could add enough staging (and trains) to support the 4-track mainline. I considered the Buffalo line, but I wasn’t sure it was my cup of tea.
So I considered modeling a branch, like the Bald Eagle branch or the Clearfield coal branches, or maybe even the Northern Central branch through southern PA/northern MD. But all had limitations, either from the standpoint of sameness of traffic (all coal) to no passenger trains, to requiring locomotives (I1s 2-10-0s) that aren’t available commercially in N. After building my H10s 2-8-0, I think I’m done with kitbashing steam for awhile.
Then I realized that what I’m doing now, modeling a fictional segment of the PRR’s Middle Division, is very satisfying. No one can nail me down and say “They never ran that locomotive on that coal branch” because it didn’t really exist. But it could have. So, I propose to do the same on a larger scale.
I have in mind double track mainline representing Pennsy or Penn Central/Conrail/Amtrak (depending on which era I want to run) with a city scene, a country/mountain scene, and a coal mining scene. I’d like to even add a stretch of track with overhead catenary for my GG1. This way I can capture the feel of the Pennsy without trying to do justice to individual scenes (such as the massive Altoona shops, Enola Yard, the Rockville Bridge, Horseshoe Curve, and the 4-track main).