I’m just about to start my second layout and as I was coming up with the Idea of what I wanted it to be modeled after, all that popped into my head was the small Santa Fe spur that runs to Escondido: the very tracks that I grew up around. So my layout is based upon those tracks and the industries that they served and still serve.
So what is your deal? Does your layout have a special meaning of its existence or did you just create it out of thin air?
Show pictures if you have any.
I have a multi industry layout, …eventually i’ll have a refinery, a cattle loading facility, a gravel pit, a steel wire and pipe distributor, a flour and grain elevator, a power plant, a port for container traffic, and various warehouses to support the industries…I have 23’ x 25’ to work with and plan on using every inch of it for something…chuck
Insipiration for my new layout (under construction) came while living in north Fort Worth, TX for three years (2000-2003). Driving every day through Saginaw, TX I knew that this area just begged to be modeled with the moderate sized yard the dozens of industries right along the BNSF right of way, including the largest grain elevators in TX (I have always loved modeling rails and grain together). I researched the sub and am modeling the area with connections to Wichita Falls (online) and Houston (staging).
Ron
Mine is a 50 mile slice right through the Twin Cities featuring BNSF, CP and UP. There will be a lot of mainline action, but also a lot of industrial switching and interchange. Should be a lot of fun when it’s done.
Plenty of grain elevators too.[;)]
I suppose a little of all of my youth came into play in my freelanced layout. I have steam engines from four different roads on my layout, so I can’t be prototypical. The three are eastern, and one is White Pass, so there’s no history there. However, my father was a mining engineer, and we spent many years around mining communities and railroads from Peru to British Columbia. It began with steam in my youth, and graduated to well-established diesel when we repatriated to Canada when I was 14. By then I had other interests, so diesels don’t have a nostalgic pull for me.
To answer your question, mining, passenger service, machining, and agriculture figure prominently on my layout. I don’t have the room to get much else in without compromising the expansive vistas and lack of complication that I prefer
-Crandell
You see I caught a brake with the roads that I was collecting. I had engines from SF, SP, UP, BN, and as we all know BN and SF are BNSF, and SP is now UP. So I didn’t have to get rid of any of my engines, I can run them all.
The railroad i’m modeling used to run through the San juan range in Colorado, my favorite place to backpack. Whenever I work on it, I run the bacjground sound, birds and a creek burbling, and it’s alomost like a free trip to the mountains. The really nice part is that my mountains are snowfree year round, instead of buried up to 30 feet deep from September to June.
Mine is associated with my youth in El Paso TX. Although the town I have is ficticious it runs similar to lots of small towns along the Lordburg sub of the old SP. Added in my own small local line for additional interest (to me ), but the focus is the SP, albeit as if the UP never took them over. That way I can still buy new power and paint it SP. Desert is my theme .
I grew up on Long Island outside of New York, where my exposure to railroads was limited to the Long Island Rail Road commuter rail lines. There was very little freight traffic on the LIRR. Once in a while, I’d get a treat by being able to ride the subways in New York City. When LifeLike came out with their R-17 train, the first mass-market subway cars I’ve ever seen, I was able to fulfill my dream of building a layout with subways on it, or rather, under it.
I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, MI, so I developed a love of heavy industry [esp. steelmaking] and Great Lakes shipping. When I moved to Maryland in my teen years, I saw a lot of coal drags on the B&O. So my layout has a steel mill, an ore dock, a coal mine - and numerous smaller lineside industries on the mainline.
Well, I have two or three things going on at this time.
First there’s an N-scale, hexagon shaped layout that’s just a circle of track, but we’re trying to get scenicking experience from it. The area we’re trying to match is West Virginia, but there’s no intention of any operation of special trains.
Now I’m looking at using some HO stuff we received to make an L-shaped layout loosely-based on the Minneapolis flour-milling industry. There will be actual operations on this, and more scenery.
Ultimately, I’d like to build a large N-scale layout, probably sectional or modular, that deals with the copper mining railroading in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s UP.