In January
of 2017 my fiancé and I moved from our small 450 square foot apartment where I
have done all my previous work for this blog and now we are renting a house
with a nice sized basement. Being a HO scale modeler from the beginning I began
to eye ball the basement as a space of my own to finally build a train layout
but a question came to mind, “what am I going to model?” This is a tough
question for me to answer, for years now, I have been buying trains with mostly
one railroad and one specific route in mind. I have always enjoyed the Burlington
Northern and their famed Marias Pass route in northwestern Montana. Nearly 70%
of my rolling stock and locomotives reflect that area and railroad. I was left
with a difficult decision that went along with my original question in mind,
the basement was nowhere near the overall space I had always planned on
utilizing for this massive Marias Pass layout of about 40’X60’. What I had in
front of me was around a quarter of that size 25’x9’. With us only being in the
house for a month I sort of put the layout idea on hold and focused on another
corner of the basement that is around 10’x10’ that worked out perfectly as a
work bench and display area, which this will receive its own blog to talk about
that whole event in the near future.
As a few
months had passed, I came back to the layout space and forced myself to make a
choice. I wasn’t going to let all my HO scale models sit in their boxes and
only come out when I got the itch to set up an oval of Kato Unitrack and run
trains on the living room floor. I had to do something with this space. The
planning really took off from there. In this new series, I will be blogging about
this build process and about my plans. I hope to make mistakes and take you along as I solve them
and learn from them, and lastly, I plan to have a ton of fun with this hobby
and build, as it should be. It is a rewarding and challenging hobby and
I have never turned away from it so why should a smaller space than I had hoped
for change my drive for a great model railroad layout?
What to model with the space I have.
This space I have mapped out truly
is a fair amount of space to work with, I know a lot of people who would be
ecstatic to have this area to use. The thought of not modeling the Marias Pass
route sort of bugged me in that I had spent almost three years of and on
planning for it and doing research on the route and now nothing would become of
it other than knowing a lot about a railroad route that really had no significance
in my hobby or daily life. The thought of only modeling a small area of the
route then came to mind but it proved to be more of a letdown as I began to
draw out a track plan on paper because I honestly could not decide on a spot to
do, it just wouldn’t be the same as having the all the key spots on one layout.
A few weeks went by and one day as I
was looking over my shelves of trains it dawned on me that I could model the
second-best thing I had on my shelves. Many years ago, I have created a proto-freelance railroad to operate on my local model railroad club. The railroad is known as the
Omaha and Saint Louis Railway and I have done around a dozen locomotives for
this railroad and I have modeled about a dozen or so rolling stock to go along
with these locomotives. I had already created a half way believable history for
the railroad and even a paint standards chart and roster sheet to follow. Why
not explore the possibility to model something of my own and do it my way, so
to speak? After some more thought, the measuring tape came out and I was off to
the races on figuring out what kind of bench work I could create with this space.
I created another challenge for myself to conquer in that I wanted the layout
to be in modular sections so that if we had to move, since we are renting the
house, it would be easy to do so with minimal disruption to the layout itself.
The concept for this was simple. Make each section no bigger than 2’x4’ to make
it easy to move around and have all electronics plug and play in between each
section. This is the plan I want to follow, and that has played a part in how I
build and design this layout. In the early part of planning this layout I went
with the idea of using a measuring tape and some masking tape to layout the
basic shape on the floor, this creates two situations. First, it gives you a
physical idea in 2D form of what the layout will look like and secondly, you
can walk around it to see if there are any problem areas when it comes to
walking around the layout. At first, I was going to maximize the
area with the biggest design I could fit but I still didn’t know what area of
my proto-freelance mainline I was going to model. After laying down the tape
one night I left the space alone and let it kind of simmer in my mind as I
continued about my normal daily life.
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| Original taped out design of the bench work. |
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| Another view of original design of the bench work. |
The bench work outline continued to
evolve as I kept looking it over. Originally, the total length would have been
25’ but as I started to sketch out the track plan that area that was included
with the total length proved to be unnecessary to the look and feel of the
layout. Once I had the outline of the bench work taped to the floor it was time
to figure out the points of interest. First, I put the bench work plan onto
graph paper by drawing it out as four squares to the foot, this helped with
keeping myself honest when I drew out any ideas on the paper. The next
challenge was to find a location for the layout for me to model. I had bought a
railroad atlas for the northern Midwest states that included whole region in
which the Omaha and Saint Louis operates in. My criteria for the region was
that it had to have access to a Burlington Northern line for an interchange
because I have so much BN equipment and I would like to have another
interchange to add variety to bring railcars on and off the layout. My
searching on the railroad atlas found the towns in the state of Missouri in its northeast corner outside of Kansas City.
The track plan and design really began to take shape after this discovery.
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| Bench work tape design evolution as of April 2017 |
The towns from West to East would
include: Camden, Lexington, Dover, and Grand Pass. Camden is a very small town that the Burlington Northern happen to
run pass and Lexington, Missouri happened to have the Missouri Pacific pass
near it as well. A bonus was that the two towns were close to each other and
the Missouri river was in between them. As for Dover and Grand Pass, they were
relatively in a close straight line from Lexington and seemed logical for the
O&SL to pass through them. With the towns figured out and the geography now
know for what type of topography the layout would have, the next step is to
decide on industries and yard space. This will be covered in the next chapter
of the build. TRWBM.
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