Layout Concept - St. Albans Model Railway

So, you’ve sold your house and are positive you will soon move into a house with a decent sized dedicated layout space. But you don’t have the exact dimensions. What kind of layout planning can you do?

This was the situation I was in for about 5 or 6 months in 2005. What you can do is figure out the layout parameters: the theme, era, operations, scenic focus, and design standards. These are all things that fit under the notion of what John Armstrong dubbed your “Givens and Druthers”. That is, what absolutely had to be (Givens) and what the relative priorities were among the other stuff you wanted (Druthers). Some of the givens you won’t know until you know your layout space, but you can still make a lot of progress.

In this post I’ll describe the layout concept – the theme that provides the context for the actual layout design. In subsequent posts I’ll discuss the layout design standards and space, then the layout design itself. For simplicity this post will cover the concept as it is today, which has evolved somewhat relative to the concept as it was before the design started.

The layout is of a mythical Midwestern city sitting on a large navigable river that is part of the Mississippi system, but not the Mississippi itself. The location is necessarily vague, but imagine somewhere to the west of the Quad Cities in Iowa and Illinois. Needing a name for my city I thought of how U.S. cities were frequently named after European towns and cities, then thought about how my wife and I were married in Harpenden, England, which is a village near the town of St. Albans. I chose St. Albans for the city name, and Harpenden for a suburb that will be featured on the layout.

I chose a freelance theme instead of modeling a prototype for two reasons. First, I tried hard but couldn’t find a prototype that includes everything I wanted. As I was living in the Kansas City area at the time I looked hard at potential prototypes in that region, including cities in neighboring states, but in every case the compromises compared to what I wanted were just too great. For a while I tried a hybrid approach, with a prototype as a base but with modifications, then finally I accepted it would be freelance. Of course, all those Real Model Railroader™ voices in my head went “tsk tsk”, so I assuaged my guilty conscience by promising myself to make the outdoor layout a pure prototype – something that I have done.

Supposedly we freelancers aren’t Real Model Railroaders™ because we can “cheat” any time we run into a challenging design or operations issue by changing the railroad itself. However, as I started the process I discovered a second reason for doing a freelance, and that is that freelancing gives you a whole different type of design fun. You are creating not just a model of a railroad, but also an entire fictional world with its own history, and you can spend as much time developing that world and its history as you want. As an adolescent and even well into my younger adult years I would draw maps of fictional cities, building them up historically over time and photocopying a snapshot of the city map at different points in time for comparisons over the eras. I very much enjoyed incorporating the various factors that influence city changes over time, as well as noting how past influences shape, sometimes in very subtle ways, the way a city looks today.

So, when I started on the St Albans Model Railway that was exactly what I did. The rest of this post covers the fictional history of that city and its surroundings up to the present day, with obvious special emphasis on the resulting model railroad.

St Albans was founded as river cities often were, but was lucky to have had a small number of wealthy leaders who had a bit more foresight than usual. As railroads became a prominent part of the American frontier in the 1830s and 40s (and the Mississippi valley was the frontier then) the St Albans leaders, in contrast to the business powers in downriver St Louis, did not see the railroadsa as unwelcome competition to their riverboat business but instead as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. They openly courted railroads and, recognizing that future westward railroads and trans-continental railroads were inevitable, pushed to have those routed through St Albans. They built a bridge across the St Albans river, saving critical costs and time for any railroad wanting to head west, and established a local St Albans Municipal Railroad (SAMRR – colloquially referred to as “Sammer”, or “The Sam”) to connect the various railroads in the city area with each other and the river landings, and to provide pretty much any service needed for railroads that were either just getting established in the city or which found it helpful to subcontract the work. The SAMRR still exists today as a very busy hybrid private/government entity.

The business strategy worked. Even railroads which didn’t route their main lines through St Albans found it profitable to establish branches to the city even before their main lines were complete, just because of the interchange trade. A number of railroads did push mainlines through St Albans, notably the Burlington, whose mainline (now part of the BNSF) is the key feature of the model railroad. As traffic grew SAMRR upgraded facilities including double-tracking the main bridge over the river in the 1860s. That bridge lasted for over a century, with upgrades in the 1890s and 1930s to support heavier locomotives, until being made obsolete by a new bridge that opened in 1995. However, that old bridge was kept as a historical landmark, and has been modified to support pedestrian traffic in the trendy center of St Albans. Both bridges are features of the model railroad. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The post-civil war era brought with it a lot of optimism in the city, which through its extensive transportation network had a diverse economy that was better able than most to withstand the frequent economic panics of the latter 1800s. In that era there were many civic-minded groups, some of which had been previously focused on the abolition movement, who were now focused on bettering the city itself. Two universities were founded near the river just north of what was then the city limits and numerous parks were established. As river freight and passenger traffic waned due to the continuous improvement of the railroads, the northern river landings were abandoned and their riverside locations converted to more parks, museums, a concert hall, a large city library and a theater district (many of these paid for by millionaire residents of the city through gifts from their estates). Several festivals were established, the most popular being one focused on Shakespeare's plays. St Albans became a popular regional tourism destination, easily reached via railroad, and the success of the cultural festivals inspired other cities elsewhere, such as Ashland, Oregon.

A few miles to the east of St Albans was a smaller town of Harpenden, situated in an unusual geologic formation (for that part of the country) that made for a picturesque little valley. It was just within reasonable commute distance by train, and soon became a popular place for the wealthier people of St Albans to build houses – either as their main house or a weekend house. The Rock Island built their line east from St Albans adjacent to the Burlington for part of the way, with the two lines separating at Harpenden. As a result, a joint passenger station was constructed at the point where the lines separated – a unique Victorian building that became very well known to railroad photographers and is now a designated historical landmark. A town square was constructed next to the station and it was soon surrounded by rows of Victorian shops catering to the local high-end clientele. That in turn attracted shoppers from other towns, who found it easy to access due to the fact that both Burlington and Rock Island commuter lines made Harpenden a stop for all trains – even the Limiteds to Chicago. As a result the town experienced a growth boom in the last two decades of the 1800s and again in the 1920s.

St Albans continued on a normal growth path for a Midwestern American city through the middle 20th century. Many industries were attracted to the city due to the excellent transportation infrastructure combined with the outstanding cultural opportunities. However, at that time the biggest factor in industry location was usually the proximity to natural resources, and on that count St Albans wasn’t as attractive as some of the cities in the mountains or along the Great Lakes. Thus, economic growth was generally steady over time but there never was a boom time of extremely rapid growth.

Following World War 2 most of America experienced the sudden and rapid rise of the car-dependent suburbs and St Albans was no exception. At first the “Levittown clones” were built primarily in the prairies along the many railroad lines that fanned out like bicycle spokes from the city, and new passenger stations were constructed to serve those towns. But once those areas were used up the sprawl continued to fill any open space near the city. This initially had little direct effect on the city itself except for the increase in commuter train traffic, which when combined with the increase in long-distance passenger train travel resulted in SAMRR adding 8 tracks to Union Station, making a new total of 44.

However, soon the suburbs were filled up not just by new families looking for a place to live but also by long-time city residents attracted to the extra room. More suburbanites meant more cars, and more cars meant freeways. The first short freeway was built in west St Albans in 1955. But after Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956, the country went on a freeway building spree in which many great neighborhoods were wiped out by eminent domain. The first interstate through St Albans opened in 1959. Fortunately, unlike many historic city districts in the U.S. (such as the gold country towns of Auburn, Grass Valley and Nevada City in California), both St Albans and Harpenden city centers were spared being split in two parts by freeways.

Progress continued. The first modern-style shopping mall opened in 1962 – the first modern indoor shopping mall opened in 1968. The new St Albans International Airport opened in 1963. However, traffic to the airport quickly became so congested on the access freeway at rush hours that the city council approved building a commuter line extension to the airport in 1964 – a line that is still heavily used today.

Changes like these were happening across the country, and for most Midwestern cities they took a great toll on their city centers. The term "inner city" soon took on very negative connotations due to neglect, blight, and high crime rates. Cities like St Louis and Kansas City ended up closing down their Union Stations in the early 1970s. Partly this was because long-distance passenger train traffic had become but a trickle. But more importantly very few people still commuted to the city centers for work or shopping, and so the cities didn’t try to keep the local commuter lines running after the railroads gave up running passenger trains.

Fortunately, all those decisions to build a strong cultural base in the city center that happened in the latter 1800s made a huge difference to St Albans a century later. Like Chicago, San Francisco and New York, St Albans still had a surviving, if not entirely thriving, city center in the 1970s. As the class 1 railroads abandoned even local passenger travel SAMRR’s mission was expanded to providing commuting services, and SAMRR received subsidies from the federal, state and local governments to help. The act of combining the individual commuter lines did help improve the efficiency and customer satisfaction of the commuter services in the early years, but only until the severe economic troubles of the late 1970s led to major budget cuts.

The low point in our story comes in fall, 1979, in Harpenden. The Rock Island, in one of a series of desperate moves to avoid the total liquidation that ultimately would consume the line the next year, abandoned the line that went through the town. By special arrangement the Burlington Northern (successor to the Burlington) maintained one track on the Rock Island east from Harpenden to service the freight customers there until the disposition of that segment of the railroad was determined (it would ultimately be sold to a company that ran several short lines). However, the line was no longer being maintained for commuter traffic, and in fact years of maintenance neglect had caused several expensive, but fortunately not fatal, commuter train derailments. SAMRR couldn’t afford to take over sole maintenance, so cancelled service to that line. Worse, from the perspective of Harpenden, the regional bus service, which had run a terminal at the Harpenden train station for connections with the commuter lines, responded by moving to a new terminal at the nearby indoor mall that had just opened. Without the bus service SAMRR also removed Harpenden as a stop on the express line in another cost-cutting move.

Harpenden’s downtown retail district had already been under revenue pressure for years, and to many this looked like the end of what had once been a premier shopping district. But the business and town leaders in Harpenden were known for their perserverance and dedication to their community. Back in 1974 they undertook a major project to eliminate cars from all the streets in the shopping district, replaced the pavement with cobblestones, and turned the shopping district into a re-creation of the 1880s Victorian town Harpenden had once been. This change did provide a boost to the town's revenues for several years. But the 1979 recession, combined with the loss of easy public transport access to the district, combined with a new shopping mall opening up nearby, was perhaps just one strike too many. The town leaders considered building a multi-story parking garage in the spot of the former metro bus terminal, but couldn’t find the funds for it.

That Thanksgiving the town mayor made a trip to Chicago to visit his daughter’s family and his newly born grandson. He vowed not to talk about the town’s troubles at a holiday event, but when his daughter’s father-in-law prodded he told him the whole story. The mayor mentioned the gap in the center of town caused by the abandoned train tracks and the need to get something – anything – to attract people back to the town center.

As luck would have it, the person he was talking to was a director of Burlington Northern (BN) who had been struggling with ways to do a better job of preserving the railroad’s historic legacy despite the very difficult economic times (as the saying goes, when the economy gets a sniffle, the railroads get the flu). The tiny coincidence of this conversation resulted in a massive to the future of Harpenden and St Albans.

The BN director suggested they open a train museum – with real, live running trains including steam engines – right in the town square. They had the tracks, they had a great setting (the Victorian town square) and they had space for a museum building (the abandoned terminal). He offered arrange the loaner of some preserved steam engines immediately, and suggested that they could bring in some trailers and set up some portable exhibits to see if the concept would bring people to Harpenden. If it worked they could make it a permanent project.

The Harpenden town leaders embraced the idea thoroughly – they really had no other option, and it at least gave them something to act upon. They had no trouble recruiting volunteers, and the almost-impromptu “Harpenden Train Fest 1979” was a surprise hit. It was still a very weak retail season, but an improvement over the previous two years and far better than they had expected. As soon as Christmas ended that year their work began in earnest on making this a permanent theme.

At the time no one in Harpenden could know if this plan was going to work. The national mood was very pessimistic, they were fighting against forces that had shuttered city and town centers across America, and no one had tried anything like this before. 25 years later, though, the St Albans Business School published a highly influential study on the Harpenden success story. They identified 11 factors that were important in the project, but 2 that were absolutely critical. The first of these two was that the town setting was already perfect for what they were trying to do. Attempts to make such a town square from scratch would have appeared artificial – and thus been less appealing to customers – and in any event they didn’t have the funds to create such a place artificially. Second was that the volunteer force they recruited was very unusual both in terms of number and dedication. Partly this was because there was a very strong civic pride in Harpenden. But mostly because so many railroad fans from literally across the continent heard of the project and wanted to be part of it.

In 1980 the new Harpenden National Railroad Museum (with special emphasis on the Burlington Northern) was established and in 1984 the new museum building was given a grand opening, with a very large section of the museum focused on trains for children. The entire shopping district complemented the museum with its focus on history and trains. City sales tax revenues in 1984 were a stunning nine times what they had received in 1979. Today this is the most visited tourist attraction in the state, and restored classic trains run between Harpenden and St Albans Union Station every weekend in the summer and during special events the rest of the year. Harpenden is now noted in the Amtrak catalogue as a special stop, and is the destination of occasional railfan excursions from various points in the Midwest and West. Harpenden town square, with the museum, museum yard, and the historical station, all are a special feature of the model railroad.

While Harpenden was very much enjoying the towns revival in the 1980s so was St Albans. 1983 was the first year since 1971 when more people moved into the city itself than moved out. By 1985 the city center was noted nationally as a trendy spot – featured in college travel guides like Let’s Go – and by 1988 the city center had by far the highest real estate prices in the state. The factories and warehouses that made up the area near Union Station had long been abandoned, but were now either being converted to condos or razed and replaced by new row houses, retail, and even a new indoor stadium. By 1992 SAMRR noted that more people were now living in the city and commuting to work in the suburbs than were commuting from the suburbs to the city -- the first time that had ever happened -- and that extra trains to the city were necessary for Friday and Saturday nights and weekends due to the popularity of the city center as an entertainment destination.

By the mid-1990s the freight railroads were again thriving in the city, with a lot of short lines that used to be spurs of class 1 railroads. The railroads had a lot fewer local sidings to service, as factories moved off shore and businesses with low transportation needs opted for trucks. However, the businesses that still used the railroads needed many, many more cars than were needed in the past, more than making up for the difference. If you ride the rails around St Albans you can still see lots of evidence of old spurs and sidings from the past – but you’ll also find quite a few large, modern freight centers.

SAMRR has sold off some of the land it once owned. For example, Union Station now hosts only 8 tracks, not 44. But there are plenty of SAMRR yards throughout the city, including the downtown intermodal yard (if you look closely you can find visual evidence of that location’s rich past, starting as a riverboat landing and later serving as several different kinds of railroad facilities) and the SAMRR commuter maintenance yard. Union Station, the commuter maintenance yard, and all the trackage around that area are featured on the model railroad.

In addition, the various short and regional lines have their own railroad facilities in the city area. The class 1 railroads prefer to locate maintenance and yards in lower cost locations instead of inside cities, but all the class 1 operations still maintain at least one yard in the metro area. The BNSF has a substantial flat freight yard (14 tracks, with the 4 in the center of the diamond usually allocated for arrivals and departures) that is used as the starting and ending point of the metro area local freight runs. These days it that yard is extremely busy, with two drill tracks from one side and one from the other, and often all three are active. This yard is included in the model of St Albans. Also included is about half of one of the short lines, including a factory that makes items from plastics.

The BNSF local freight yard is adjacent to a remodeled bottling plant, formerly used as a brewery, that has some very interesting approach tracks, including two single track bridges dating from the early 20th century. Replacements have been discussed but as the bridges remain safe, no one wants to pay to change them.

The last major influence on the St Albans-Harpenden history started in 1993. The city was again on the upswing, and as such was experiencing lots of traffic congestion The city council launched a study to seek solutions. Often studies such as this fail– either the firm commissioned to perform the study is not up to the task, or the political will to implement the recommendations is lacking. In this case, though, recognizing that St Albans was blessed with two outstanding universities (both with branches in Harpenden) the council asked the universities to conduct the study in cross-discipline fashion, looking at the problem from perspectives ranging from engineering to sociology, and the council specifically directed the study group to consult with the various stakeholders in the city.

The result was a 10 year plan that amazingly was implemented almost exactly as intended and nearly on time. Most of it was done in 8 years, the last parts over the next 7 years. From a railroading perspective the plan had two major impacts.

The first was the creation of a downtown intermodal station. The study realized that a big factor in the traffic congestion were trucks moving to and from the city center, mostly bringing retail goods in, but also for construction, some manufacture export, and trash haulage. The study suggested that a more detailed feasibility study be conducted on whether an intermodal yard would allievate enough traffic to pay for itself, and if so how. Following the second study, and with terrific support from the local railroads, an intermodal facility was set up, run by BNSF with SAMRR support, and with structured incentives for local businesses to use it. This is one of the smallest intermodal facilities by area in the country, but has the highest throughput in world relative to the space occupied, and achieves very fast response times (one of the requirements that came out of the study). It is a key feature of the model railroad.

The other impact was the revamping of the commuter lines. In 1993 SAMRR was doing a decent job running the commuter trains compared to similar organizations in other cities, but there were opportunities for improvement. Many people who used the commuter train said they did so only because traffic/parking was so bad, or because they didn’t own a car (as is true for a lot of city residents). The study suggested that many more travelers could be swayed to use the commuter trains by making a number of fairly simple and easy changes to the train experience. The study suggested the costs of the changes would be paid for by the increase in fare revenue (each additional passenger adds almost no operational cost so the additional fare is almost pure profit). These changes were not surprising: better lighting everywhere (to increase feeling of safety), more cleanliness everywhere, easier-to-understand maps and timetables, better station access, more on-train amenities, easier pay methods, bike carry facilities, and seating areas that made it easier to work (even in 1993 they recognized the early laptop and cell phone trend).

The next recommendation was thought to be much harder to implement: highly reliable schedules. Reliable schedules were considered essential to obtaining a high ridership, but as most schedule delays were caused by conflicts with the freight railroads, thus outside the control of SAMRR, the study wasn’t sure how much could realistically be done. However, what SAMRR found was that the railroads were just as interested in achieving predictable schedules as SAMRR, and were willing to fund at least half of the costs of the necessary changes. An improved traffic control system was put in place, partly to help plan schedules but mostly to have a very detailed set of contingencies so that incipient delays could be immediately recognized and mitigated. In addition, the most common contributor of lengthy delays (those over an hour) was found to be people committing suicide on the tracks – something just about every public agency in the city had an interest in finding ways to prevent. A number of changes were made to help, but the most effective one was to have monitoring cameras identify potential suicides and notify local police before the train comes. They found that most suicides spend some time waiting in the location before acting, and they have learned to identify the warning signs in their behavior. All of these items are factored into the modeling of the commuter railroad, which includes models of Union Station, Harpenden station, two intermediate stations, and a part-time stop next to the stadium.

The last recommendation from the study had the biggest impact on ridership, and also has the biggest impact on the model. The SAMRR train network did a great job of getting people from a point in the suburbs to the city – or to points along the line between the two, but not from a suburban point on one line to a point on another. A passenger certainly could do this if s/he wanted to by taking the train to Union Station and transferring, but often this meant waits of up to half an hour on the platform if the trains were on time – otherwise possibly longer. The study suggested that if somehow the transfers could be made instantaneous and painless that usage could more than triple.

The solution required extensive modeling and testing. The concept was that there would be several express trains each day that were synchronized to arrive within 90 seconds of each other at Union Station. In order to make the transfer between the trains simplest and most effective, they would identify pairs of trains most likely to exchange passengers with each other, based on known traffic patterns, and have them arrive on adjacent tracks such that the car doors aligned perfectly. Special ramps would be constructed that would connect between those two cars, avoiding people having to even walk onto a platform to change cars.

Then the trains next on the list of “most likely to exchange customers” would be organized to arrive on the same platform as each other. This way most of the transfer passengers would either go out the door on one side to the adjacent train or across the platform to the next train. For the other trains, SAMRR thought, inter-platform ramps could be created to go under the tracks, but with dual moving walkways (that would be turned on only for the time the trains were in the station) to allow for fast exchanges.

Communication with passengers well in advance of Union Station, then again at Union Station, would be key to making this work. At the suburban passenger stations there would be clear indicators of where each car would arrive on the platform and, if you were transferring at Union Station, which car was best for you depending on your destination.

This was so innovative that it was unclear if it was realistic. SAMRR identified the two trains that already had the most transfers between them and organized a pilot program for just those two. They watched, learned, and adapted, and most importantly were stunned to find that transfer ridership between those two increased by 80% after 3 months based on word-of-mouth alone.

After that the program was extended a bit at a time. Two more trains were scheduled together, with connecting bridges between them, then two more so that all six spoke lines were involved. The next time schedules were reworked a simultaneous arrival for all six was included. After observing transfer traffic for 3 months in this arrangement, the trains were reorganized around platforms so that the most optimal transfer arrangement was included.

The program was still by word-of-mouth only. For the next step SAMRR thought they would have to construct those special inter-platform ramps. But the observers noted that the passengers themselves had already figured out a better approach. A passenger on a train on platform 1, for example, would walk through the trains at platform 2, 3, 4, and 5 to get to platform 6. This sounds like a lot, but really means only crossing platform 2-3 and platform 4-5. plus the 4 intermediate trains -- and that's in the most extreme case of having to cross *all* the trains. Since the doors were all aligned, open on both sides, and at platform level without stairs (the newer “Bombardier” commuter coaches) it was a snap. The only problem would be avoiding major people crunches in the middle trains during the most popular travel hours. This could be mitigated by organizing people to sit in certain cars based on which train they would transfer to at union station. So a publicity campaign was started at the suburban stations – first just for the regulars, then once everyone had adapted, a city wide ad campaign began.

Today the passenger usage on the SAMRR (labeled “The Sammer” on the cars themselves) is the highest in North America per number of cars in use. And while subsidized the Sammer commuter rail system uses a smaller tax subsidy per commuting passenger than do the St Albans freeways. The operations of this special 6-passenger train sync up are (or rather, "will be") both challenging and fun.

With a world class commuter railroad, a terrific cultural riverfront area, loads of great places to railfan, and on top of it the special town square/train museum in Harpenden, St Albans is a railfan Mecca. Every summer there is a Rail Fest weekend that is sponsored by the local railroads and is heavily attended. One of the operations scenarios on the model railroad is for that weekend.

So that’s the concept. In the next post I cover the design standards and how design started.