Design influences: second layout

Model railroading is a lifelong hobby, so they say, but for some reason most of us forget about it during our teens and twenties. We love trains as kids and again after we settle down, but almost every model railroader admits that the lure of girls, cars, and rock n' roll overwhelmed any interest in trains while we were young adults.

So it would have been for me except that my college was on the 4-1-4 system, in which a 1 month "winter term" was sandwiched between two normal 4 month semesters. We had great freedom in choosing our winter term project, and as a freshman I chose to build a model railroad.

I still had no idea about layout design, so on my first trip to the hobby ship I was referred to this layout book:


This was first published in 1956 and is still available today after 30 or 40 printings. Except for the reference to N scale it's basically unchanged from the original version.

Now, the author was Linn Westcott and as I said earlier he was from the old school of layout designers. In his philosophy scenery and realistic views took a back seat to cramming in as much track as possible. Still, he did include a few plans from other designers who tried to create plausible-looking layouts, and I eventually chose this one:

It's not evident until you study it closely, but what makes this layout work is that there is a yard on the left side, then on the right side the railroad climbs up a mountain through a series of switchbacks. The switchbacks add the air of plausibility to the setting -- clearly this railroad had to have tracks close together in order to climb up difficult mountain terrain. The theme is logging/mining, which coincidentally was the theme I'd chosen for this project (trying to justify it as an educational activity for my college).

I modified the plan slightly, reducing the length by 6" to fit into a bedroom and the width from 5' to 4' by reducing the yard at the bottom (it did seem like a huge yard for an otherwise small railroad, I rationalized).

I also knew nothing about construction but I got Westcott's book on model railroad benchwork (an updated version is still available today) and using his "cookie cutter" technique I dived into the building process. I made some mistakes but did get the structure built with a 2x4 gridwork and 1/2" plywood. Then I laid cork roadbed and track. I got so far as to build some kit cars (Colorado Midland -- this was standard gauge as I felt I wasn't ready to tackle narrow gauge just yet), some Campbell wooden structures, and even scratchbuilt a trestle bridge that supported two adjoining tracks -- I was pretty proud of that. I got started creating the base for the mountains when winter term ended and I went back to college (and got credit for the project). All in all a good learning experience.

Once again, alas, my parents moved shortly after the layout was built and only the train materials were saved -- the wood was dismantled and junked.

The main lessons I took to the next layout:

1. On the plus side, the use of mountains and switchbacks is a good way to create realism while still fitting in a lot of track in a small place. This is because the train still goes "somewhere" vertically, if not so far horizontally. I would use variations of this mountain railroad theme on my next two layouts.


2. On the minus side, operations that involves short distances of back-and-forth aren't so much fun, at least for me. I prefer relatively long runs. As a result I've never again created this kind of back-and-forth switchback layout, nor the similar industrial switching puzzle kind of layout.


3. Remember my comments before about loving passenger trains? Yeah, I missed those on this layout. I ran some mixed trains but it wasn't the same. All my subsequent layouts have had passenger trains as a central feature.


4. Some model railroaders live for steam, and this layout was based in the steam era in part because I was looking forward to running steam. However, I was born in the diesel era and I learned that for me steam is fun but not any more fun than diesel. Since building this layout I've usually had some steam for novelty sake but not as the main theme. Electric, on the other hand, is fascinating ... but that's for discussion of my third layout.


5. And, of course, I learned that layouts have to be movable. Not exactly "portable", which implies the ability to be transported and set up within a short time, but at least the ability to pack and move to a location thousands of miles away. Every layout that I built after this one had moveability features designed in.

After this layout I did box up and keep the HO equipment I had for many years without ever using it. My next layout wouldn't be started until 9 years later.