If money, space, time and pissing off my wife were not a factor I’d model the entire KBSR, to scale, from end to end in HO. Because of the nostalgic nature it would be amazing for me to do.
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Your layout plan does not look like it supplies the amount of negative space I was thinking about. 700 linear feet of basement wall of nothing but trees and track would seem boring to me, (the OPs criteria was 1000 feet long, so im assuming a 700 foot straight wall of negative space) and I like rural railroading over urban. I don’t think you would like that much linear feet of scenery either, but I could be wrong
Not to mention the time and money spent repetitively building trees to fill 700 linear feet
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How much space would you need?
Rich
I like my current one. Less is more for N scale. I have a secondary sub. I run some longer trains, but not overly long. It really makes sense since my secondary sub. supports last-mile freight movements.
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I’m too lazy to do the math, but I’d guess that a model train traveling on an agricultural branch at about 30 scale mph would probably take longer than 4 minutes to traverse 700 linear feet. I could be wrong.
But your description also includes modeling a variety of scenic points of interest. Not exactly what I’m talking about. And a lot of real agricultural branches don’t have a lot of scenic points of interest compared the amount of nothingness, if we’re talking about modeling something exactly and not choosing what to include. IMO
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So from Kankakee to Lafayette and Kankakee to Danville are both 60ish mile long legs. 3700 feet runs both ways.
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In other words, you need an abandoned Amazon distribution center. 
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Yes. I realized that. Can you imagine the amount of work??
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I cannot.
Tried it once - double decked shelf layout - stopped building it mid way thru…
Sheldon
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It’s more like 80 miles for Kankakee to Danville, IL or Kankakee to Lafayette, IN. Let’s just say it’s a lot of farm towns with grain elevators and a whole lot of fields of soybeans and corn in between. Not a ton of trees to worry about. So you’d have that in your favor as far as labor inputs for that kind of scenery lol.
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I’m terrible at math but my Trains rarely go above 10 scale miles an hour. As did many back in the days of yore. I find rural ag scenery very evocative to me at many levels, probably because I grew up in the middle of it. I am not bored with it at all.
Not everybody will understand that.. we all tend to model what is familiar to us and that’s what we are better at, when we stick to what we know. The country is much more urban today than when I was a youngster back in the Jurassic and accordingly more people today model urban scenes.
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With me, it is shelf layout, or no layout at all. My layout is 15 inches wide at its widest and gets down to 6 inches at one point. I have no problem with it at all. It’s way better than a 4 x 8 which I had before shelf layouts, and that was over 60 years ago.
Sheldon, if I had the space you have, I’d still do a shelf layout, but I’d have multiple partitions in that room that shelves would snake around. Like my present layout, which is in two different rooms, you’d never be able to see my entire layout at any one time.
But I have entirely different interests than you, all I want is a single track weed grown branch with much rural land as I can get. I am very specific about what I would want. A two or 300 foot long pile trestle only about 15 or 20 feet high above the flood plain of a narrow creek. A stretch of track with a highway paralleling it like we have so much of in Louisiana and Texas. A stretch of track through some dense woods. Several rural grade crossings, a couple of them with a general store nearby. Two or three rural team tracks, no freight station, just a gravel parking lot. Two or three 15 car passing tracks. A wye at each end of the branch. None of this sounds very exciting to most people. They didn’t see it firsthand and that’s OK, but that kind of stuff really pulls on me very hard . Thats what every layout I’ve ever had has had in bits and pieces, and will with whatever next layout I might build in the short time I have left on earth.
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a scale mile of track is ~60 ft.
1 in/sec in HO is 5 scale-mile/hour
i think what we do depends on the available space and what we want to do with our layout:
- scenic: rural, industrial, mountainous, city, urban, a blend of all
- from continuous running to pure operation
i’m inspired by (from the 1940s), a basement layout focus on operation
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Patrick. I agree with your basic point. I believe in the school of thought that enjoys modeling the mundane over the exciting. The earth just isn’t that exciting in most places. I think it’s unrealistic to model too many exciting things or too many one-offs.
I lived in Indiana for 27 years and worked throughout the state. I’m familiar with the KBSR and its mainline since I am a fan of short lines too. It runs along Hiway 52 in NW Indiana. It is some of the flattest ground in the USA and cleared of most trees.
You’re probably exaggerating the desired 1000 feet. I think the KBSR would be great to model. And the mundane scenery and rolling stock wouldn’t turn me away at all. But even I couldn’t take watching a grain train go 10 mph for over 16 scale miles through corn and bean fields. The train would probably pass only one town or one grain elevator in that 16 miles. Farms are big there, and even houses are few and far between.
But dream on, and model it in some way. You could easily capture the repetitive realism in much less space. I think if you scaled back your dreams a little bit, you would get closer to achieving them and end up more satisfied.
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For 60 years now, all I’ve ever run on my road are steam locomotives. Especially at slow speed, steam locomotives are infinitely more interesting to watch than diesel engines. They can run infinite distances through rural countryside, or even better, Great Plains settings, and I never get tired of watching them
There’s a reason why this line keeps repeating itself in Railroad folk songs….. “ stick your head out the window, watch the drivers roll.”
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Oh, I have to say……. The 1000 foot long model railroad building is a complete joke.
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The Delta Lines, right?
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Could be. Frank Ellison lived in New Orleans. As I understand it, his layout was in what they call a basement in New Orleans, but was actually an unfinished room under a raised house with a dirt floor, I heard. No residential air-conditioning back in those days. August in New Orleans means 95° and 95% humidity, I grew up in the same climate 150 miles west and was used to it. My first 4 x 8 was in an unair-conditioned second floor garage apartment room and at age 13 I did not mind it at all, scale Model Railroading was fun, very new, and completely Magic.
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