Ok, many of us have our own little world in our layouts, and we have reasons for why certain things or themes exist on the layout. So what is the back story of your layout, why does it exist? What’s the history or the region that you have based your layout on? If you created a RR or a division of Class 1 RR that didn’t exist in real life, what was your inspiration to come up with it. Does your layout have a single main theme or does it have multi-focal themes that helps create your world. Did you create your back story from real life? If not how did you come up with the idea of your theme? Does your layout feature any challenges that your RR had to overcome in order to build.
Looking forward to reading and seeing ideas and stories of your layouts.
My layout is based on a ‘what if’ extension of a Milwaukee Road branch line in SW Wisconsin. I basically extended the Mineral Point branch all the way to East Dubuque where it connects with the Milwaukee Road Iowa Division trackage. I also combined/removed some C&NW trackage so that a C&NW ‘Ridge Runner’ line train now travels over part on my line, and I use some of that trackage to reach my ‘Pecatonica’ branch. Everything is set in the late 50’s, using 1st generation engines like GP9’s and some steam.
The HO layout occupies an ‘L’ shaped 25’ by 20’ area and is DCC controlled. The layout was started in 1987, and most of the base scenery is complete. Ballasting was finally done last year(Arizona Rock & Mineral). Trackage is Atlas code 100, with the branch being redone in code 83. I use about 15-16 engines and 100+ freight cars on the layout.
i am building a pike set about 1900, which strings together scenes from a number of railroads in my home state (Rhode Island.) i am building some models of specific buildings, usually somewhat compressed, but still recognizable.
I am building a layout to help me escape from this crazy world to a better time and place when things were like my Grandpa used to talk about… and I’m a Pennsy fan because when I was a little boy, I went and rode the Straussburg Railroad and saw the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum… been a Pennsy nut ever since.
The HVT is a tourist railroad set in 1985 with close ties to the Union Pacific Railroad. The railroad operates between the interchange yard and engine facility at Thistle and the popular resort town of Hill Valley, traveling through picturesque mountains and rolling sand dunes, passing the famous Mountain Dell Scout camp and historic Fremont Indian cliff dwellings. These Indian ruins overlook the fertile Hill Valley where the Fremont Indians most likely raised corn. Trout are plentiful at Browne Lake at the head of the North Fork of Clear Creek, site of the present day Scout camp. Buffalo still graze in the luscious grass near Tatanka Lake.
The HVT was originally a narrow gauge line which began in 1897 when silver was discovered in the Clear Creek mine located in Clayton Ravine. A new Rogers locomotive #3 found its home hauling silver ore to the mainline and supplies back to the mine. The new railroad connected with the D&RGW mainline at Thistle, located between Salt Lake City and Denver, where an engine facility was being built to service and turn the helper locomotives used to help heavy freight trains over the pass at Soldier Summit. After the silver vein paid out in 1910 the line sat dormant for several years.
Here’s mine: The history of the Blackwater and Butte Creek Railroad
In 1882 J. Henry Coulter inherited the claim homesteaded in south central Oregon by his maternal grandmother’s uncle, Norman Shakespeare. Traveling on foot with his pack-mule, Daisy, he explored his property and discovered that it was forested with the usual Douglas fir trees, but that there were also acres of white oaks. It seems that Norm was a cooper and he planted the white oaks to grow his own
I DON’T think that my fellow forumites would be fascinated by a 400 year history of the sociopolitical hi-jinks that led to the complex conglomeration of rail activity in a region of Japan so remote that it has (to quote Wikipedia) only two local passenger trains and one limited express train per hour. It runs six pages of close-spaced small print.
More significant, I think, is my reason for modeling wnat I do. Five decades ago I was an Air Force sergeant, serving in the Tokyo area. My wife, who was fully aware that she had married a model railroader, suggested that we use some of my leave time to visit the Kiso Valley, home of, among other things, a narrow-gauge logging railroad. She had previously weaned me away from modeling the New York Central with a birthday gift - a brass locomotive kit that built into a nice little Japanese style tank locomotive.
So, we went to Agematsu, Nagano-ken, in September of 1964. The logger was there, powered by a bunch of four wheel diesel `critters’ so ugly they were cute, running semi-disconnects coupled with link and pin couplers. Right next to it, separated only by a fence, the Japan National Railway was running steam! And the stretch from Agematsu to Kiso-Fukushima was a helper district. Twenty car freights and eight car passenger trains powered by D51 class 2-8-2s were pushed up the 2.5% grade by a C12 class 2-6-2T. Other passenger trains were operating with DMU consists that allowed an intrepid traveler to stand and watch out the head end, two thicknesses of glass removed from the view to the front. A little way down the valley, where the catenary ended, every train that had a locomotive underwent an engine change from steam to motor or vice versa. Occasionally a freight or passenger train would be headed by one or two of those new DD13 class diesel-hydraulics.
Away from the tracks, the area was beautiful. A lot of the buildings dated from the Meiji era and befo
Mine is set in the late 50’s early 60’s of the remote hills of WV. I model after the B&O since that is the road many in my family worked for over the years from 1950-2008 when the last one retired. I have my own subdivision that I created so I didn’t have to be 100% exact if I used a real subdivision. The name of my subdivision is: Blue Ridge. I had a different name for the division when I started to build the layout but later changed it because I thought it sounded better. My division has interchanges with C&O, WM, NYC, PRR and a shortline I created. The prime loads are coal, lumber, limestone, meat, livestock, and paper. I have several yards on my layout including a working hump yard. I run a 2 track main, but on section of the layout I run 3 track mains to handle the loads. On my 3 track mains is where NYC and PRR both cross over and run on B&O’s mains before going back into their own tracks. On a different part of the layout where it’s only 2 track there is a point where WM crosses over and runs on B&O tracks all the way to the interchange and then returns to home rails past the interchange where it heads into a tunnel and heads back toward Maryland. My shortline that I have on my layout is called: Twin Peaks and Southern (TP&S). My shortline serves part of a major corporation that owns one of the regions coal mines, the company branched out to max the revenue of their lands by starting a logging company and after they found limestone while doing some surface mining they opened a limestone quary. Also the shortline has a spur that handles a stock yard next to a slaughterhouse/packing house with ice house support. A spin off business from the slaughterhouse is a paper mill that supplies butcher paper and cardboard boxes for packing meat in as well as the paper mill has several major customers so they have a steady business as well as buying the pulp
The towns of Elwood and Joliet England were railway towns with American counterparts. To connect these two towns to the main lines of the Great Northern Railway, a branchline was built by a private company. Thus formed the Elwood and Joliet Railway company.
After the 1923 grouping act, the E&JR operated as it’s own company, but had some management was taken over by the LNER, along with the management, Sir Nigel Gresely tested radically new small build locomotives on this branch line. Some of which were never acknowledged by the LNER management. Some of these included preliminary tests on the experimental W1. Many claim that Gresely built a second W1 and put it in long term storage in an abandoned engine shed, or built a new station building around it.
One management decision thought that made the E&JR management catch alot of flaq was the decision to build a branch line extension to the LMS lines several miles away. The extension was completed by 1935.
Skipping WWII, British Railways took control of the E&JR, but left the existing management to their own devises. By 1955, aging Eastern region along with Scottish and ex-LMS locomotives were left to run down their final miles before being pulled out for the cutter’s torch.
Thankfully though, BR management lost count of the many locomotives there thanks to an office fire that completely destroyed any modern records of the E&JR outside of historically preserved documents. So many pieces of motive power and rolling stock that were meant to be scrapped stayed there. until, in many cases they were the last of their class.
The line remained operational hauling materials around the line until 1970. At this point, a historical society was formed and took control of the E&JR, obtaining all the equipment and rolling stock along with operation of modern rail equipment on the line
The Columbus & Hocking Valley Ry is owned and operated by the CDB Industries and is one of 7 short lines owned by CDBI.The C&HV came into existence in 1978 when CDBI bought the old Athens sub-division of the Chessie System.During this purchase 2 other short lines was bought,the Parkersburg & Ohio Valley RR that ran from Parkersburg WV to Athens Oh and the Ohio Midland Ry that ran from Jackson,Oh to Newark,Oh.These 2 roads was quickly merged into the new C&HV.By purchasing these roads the CBDI finally had the long sought after southern Ohio coal fields and industries.The CDBI relaid the track from Nelsonville to Athens which had been removed by the C&O some years ago.The old Logan yards was rebuilt and upgraded during this time as it would serve as the home shops and the only major yard on the C&HV since it was centrally located on the line.The second yard would be located in the old C&O(nee CHV&T) Mound Street yard and would require trackage rights over the Chessie to reach..A agreement was struck with the Chessie for those rights.The former P&OV yard in Parkersburg was upgraded as was the OM yards at Jackson and Newark.
The C&HV connects with the following roads.
Chessie(c&o) at Columbus.
N&W at Columbus.
DT&I at Jackson
Chessie(b&o) at Newark.
Scioto Valley Lines at Lancaster.
Chessie(b&o) at Athens.
Commodities haul: Grain,Lumber,coal,coke,steel,fly-ash,food stuffs,sand,glass,corn sweetener,corn starch,vegetable oils,scrap,pipe,chemicals,paints,news print,pulpwood,wood chips and other general freight.Total cars handle 32,584 a year
Thanks to a aggressive marketing team freight traffic has climb a staggering 33% since the CDBI started the C&HV.
CDBI owns the following roads.
Cumberland,Dickersonville & Bristol Ry.Cumberland to Bristol VA.The CD&B is the flagship road
In one of the early Spanish missions established in Texas to convert the Indians, a priest was telling his congregation they should give to the church even though they didn’t have much to give. He said that God can use our gifts more than we know, and he told the story of the cow who gave up her feeding stall to make a place for the Baby Jesus to lay. He said the cow’s gift-- the manger-- became more a part of the Christmas scene than even the expensive gifts of the Wise Men.
But the Indians confused the cow in the priest’s Christmas story with a buffalo cow who was worshipped in their pre-Christian native religion and they began to bring back the cult of the Holy Cow. The Church tried to discourage the practice but could not stop it entirely. The village near the mission took on the name Santa Vaca, and it grew into a major city served by a subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railway.
To understand my layout (Atm it’s basic track mock up) and it’s backstory, I guess you have to understand a bit about me. I was born on the Chicago-Aurora Racetrack. I don’t mean physically. I mean, for a good part of my childhood, that was all I knew. I was able to be one of the last to be there for Burlington Northern’s end. In fact that quote down below on my signature was what a gentleman said to me as we stood and watched the E-9 Retirement Parade. It was something that in later years, I’d understand.
My layout is to/and will be a what if. What if the during the BNSF Merger, the ATSF disappeared under Cascade Green. What Burlington Northern had continued on. Would we have still taken those green engines for granted? I have 2 setups. Outdoors in G-Scale is BN’s lifespan 1970 to 1995. But in HO, because it’s cheaper on my wallet, I decided to take a Proto-Freelance take. Prototypical BN Equipment, but freelancing their exsistance as a Railroad into today’s modern age. I want to keep the BN’s legacy alive even if by a fictional means. I bleed green, among other colors. I miss sitting at the town station and watching those cascade green monsters fly through the racetrack. I miss that small last 5 years of which I can remember the Burlington Northern. So in my HO Setup, my backstory is to keep it alive. To say ‘what if they did survive, what would it be like today?’
I’m modelling a twist on the City of Madison Port Authority and Madison Railroad. (That’s Madison Indiana not some cheesehead home. Some Came Runnign was filmed there. This is the first Railroad in Indiana, and home to the 6% standard gauge non-rack Incline.
CMPA is attached to the CSX at North Vernon, INand that’s about it. In my world though, the CSX decided that CSX was a carppy name, and a waste of resources aftewr having just gotten Chessie all nice and unified, and decided to stick with Chessie. Around 1994, when the Incline was restored to allow movement of a large power tranfromer to a Madison Powerplant (this really happened) the city opted to rearvew thew old rail back to the station and use it as a tourism gig. (This didn’t happen, though it should have. And did, in my universe) A few companies then in Madison, and a few that moved in, through their weight in with the rails, which turned the finacncially underwater CMPA around much earlier than really happened. There’s a lot of pieces in this CMPA that are refrences to characters in stoies that Dad and I came up with, most of them represented in industriues. Or will whren the layout gets built. However, while the names will be wrong, 90% of them all had some counterpart in Madison at some point in time. For example, there wasa ruber duck collection who sold toy boats in a bathtub. “Ducky Bill’s” never existed, but there was a “Madison Speedboat Company” in the 1920s, that Ducky will be filling into.
Also added to the History are a few industries to the currently underutilized Jefferson Proving Grounds. A couple of trucking companies for example ralled up, and the CMPA now has it’s own Intermodal dock, and a contract with TripleCrown, whoch can also be handled by Amtrak’s Kentucky Cardinal at Seymour Indiana. There’s also a rail rebuild compan that does Private Varnish and museum restoratiuons in ts spare time, and operates a museum. The vast starge facility has also allowd them room to do lease
In the early days, Moose Bay was a small backwater community in the upper Midwest somewhere. The Brad family were “prominent” in the town, but only by comparison to those who were less so. The Brads owned the majority of the sheep that grazed on the low-grade pastures. When the Civil War came around, their lazy son John Buford Brad arranged to join the Quartermaster Corps, figuring that would keep him in the back lines and out of harm’s way. With his education and guile, he was made an officer, and soon found himself procuring food for the troops. He figured that he could enrich his family with this position, so one cold December day he arranged for the Army of the Republic to purchase several boxcars full of Haggis from the Brad family. The Haggis arrived at the front lines on Christmas Eve. After opening the cars and smelling its pungent aroma, the Union troops, in “the spirit of the holidays,” decided to donate the Haggis to their starving Confederate counterparts. The Rebels sent it back.
When news of this debacle reached Washington, the commandant of the Quartermaster Corp summoned John Buford Brad to headquarters. They were so disgusted with the incident that, after his summary court-martial, he was ordered to remove his uniform right then and there in the courtroom. With his coat and trousers at his feet, Brad stood at attention for what he thought would be his sentencing, but the assembled officers began whispering among themselves, and soon began asking questions about, of all things, his underwear.
You see, one of the problems that faced the Union Army was keeping the troops warm in the field, and John Buford Brad was wearing the underwear his sisters had made for him - a neck-to-ankle garment made of wool from the family’s sheep. They were so excited by the design and execution of this garment that they not only cancelled the demotion, but actually promoted him. And, to this day, the garment is known as a "U
My “St.Paul Route” would be a “what if” railroad I guess. It’s based on two real railroads, the St.Paul & Duluth which ran between…well, St.Paul and Duluth, oddly enough, and the Port Arthur Duluth & Western. The real StP&D was bought by Northern Pacific in 1900, because of their much shorter line between their namesake towns, and the PAD&W went bankrupt in the 1930’s. (Port Arthur and Fort William, Ontario, merged in 1970 to become Thunder Bay.)
In my version, instead of buying the StP&D the NP worked out a trackage rights agreement to use the line, and in return granted trackage rights to the St.P&D from Duluth to Brainerd MN - meaning the road would be in position to haul iron ore once the Cuyuna Range opened up in 1903. The StP&D merged with the PAD&W (which had in real life built down from Canada in northern Minnesota) and connected what’s now Thunder Bay to Duluth/Superior with a line along the north shore of Lake Superior. The RR name became St.Paul Duluth and Canadian Ry.
I use info from the real St.P&D as much as possible, borrowing train names and consists to show what this railroad might have looked like had it lasted into the mid-20th century.
During the mid 1920s, the Delaware & Hudson and the Reading Company, began to purchase the stock of an anthracite shortline named the Penn Lake Railway, in an attempt to increase their anthracite traffic. While neither road was successful in gaining complete control of the line, together they acquired the majority stake in it and were able to prevent the PL from falling into the hands of either the Lehigh Valley, or Lackawanna. However, the ICC prevented either company from exercising operational control. As a result, the Penn Lake continued to operate independently, much like the ACL and L&N’s Clinchfield. The acquisition also provided a connection to the New Haven for both roads.
Originally, the line carried mostly anthracite. Iron ore and cement soon eclipsed coal as PL’s money makers. Following World War II, Penn Lake became a crucial link for bridge traffic between D&H’s Canadian connection at Montreal, and Reading’s Midwest and South connections at Hagerstown. Soon after Norfolk & Western acquired a direct connection to Reading, CP Rail and Norfolk & Western began the Canada Direct expedited run through trains. Similar New England Direct trains operated in conjunction with New Haven.
Penn Lake’s locomotives carried Penn Lake marking, but followed the motive power policies of it’s parents. It’s diesels sported Reading’s unique equipment and D&H’s black paint scheme. By the late 1960s, PL operated with hand me down RS3s and S2s. Penn Lake quickly gained a reputation as an Alco lovers paradise. Increasingly though, the priority trains ran with the parent’s front line power. The Canada Direct trains used CP and N&W run though power almost exclusively.
On April 1st 1976, the Reading’s interest in the PL transferred to Conrail. Conrail, uninterested in the line, soon sold it’s holdings to the D&H. The D&H integrated PL’s operation
I am trying to model the Modern up to date NS,however keeping up with modern times and new HO products is difficult. I am also influenced by other model railroaders and their free-lanced ideas as well. So Im between modeling a prototype,free-lanced,modern up to date railroad in central Ohio. Im from Toledo,so the northern parts of OHIO and southern Michigan are hard to pass-up. After seeing David Barrow and Gary Hoover change their Layout concepts so many times,Im somewhat hesitant,The backstory will unfold with time.
My fictional Missouri Valley Western is a line born out of a “what if” scenario. What if two real railroads – the Sioux City & Pacific and the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley – merged and avoided being absorbed into the rapidly growing Chicago & North Western system in the 19th century?
The Missouri Valley Western is primarily a bridge route between the Union Pacific at Omaha and the C&NW’s line to Chicago. Set in 1954, the line sees tons of fast freight (including the “new” TOFCs) as well as crack passenger trains like the City of Los Angeles, the City of San Francisco, the Challenger, etc.
Way back in the day, the Missouri Valley Western also purchased another real shortline (I believe it was the Council Bluffs & St. Joseph, but I don’t have my notes handy) to provide access to Kansas City and – via the Missouri Pacific – St. Louis. So the railroad’s main purpose is tying together the UP’s western connections with two of the major intercontinental portals, Chicago & St. Louis.
My layout is centered around the fictional city of Cedricsburg (named after my late uncle who turned me on to the hobby) in southwestern Iowa. Cedricsburg, with a population of about 100,000, is a division point. Eastbound traffic is dispatched to Minneapolis/St. Paul or to Chicago and beyond to anywhere in the northeast. Westbound traffic out of Cedricsburg is headed for the UP, or re-routed southward to Kansas City and then back east toward St. Louis and beyond to the mid-Atlantic.
The layout is being built in N scale as a sectional on hollow-core doors. Eventually, it will represent Cedricsburg and about 20 miles of trackage in either direction. The eastern and western lines will meet in a shared staging yard.