Moving to Maine …

…No, not me. The railroad.

I’ve been in a bit of a modeling slump, pretty much since last year’s Kimberton meet. With the exception of re-assembling the modules upon our return home, I’ve done nothing on my layout, or the modules. There have been a few reasons:

1. Lack of time
2. Lack of available cash
3. Dissatisfaction with my available railroad space
4. Dissatisfaction with my track plan
5. Ambiguity towards my chosen railroad theme

Items 3, 4 and 5 are, in many ways, inter-related. First, Maryland’s Eastern Shore is pretty much flat. Modeling flat-lands effectively generally requires a fair amount of space in any scale, even if only trying to model a single town or industry.

Second, by trying to make the small room a multi-purpose room, I had reduced the amount of space available for modeling to maybe 1/4 of the room. This might have worked in a smaller scale, but not so well in O scale. This also restricted my track plan, and made for an exceptionally short run — the entire line could be traversed, at “prototypical” speeds, in under 2 minutes.

Finally, modeling the Eastern Shore is not what attracted me to narrow gauge modeling in the first place! My attraction to narrow gauge dates back to the mid 70′s, to a series of articles in RMC, in which Dave Frary and Bob Hayden were using HOn30 to represent funky Maine two-foot railroads. In fact, when I moved into the On30 world back around 2000, I looked into HOn30. Unfortunately, I found it plagued by many of the same problems that Dave and Bob encountered 25 years earlier — poor operational performance of the N scale locomotives used as a basis for the engine conversions. Bachmann’s excellent On30 models provided the answer to a poverty-stricken modeler who had been bitten by the narrow gauge bug.

It took a couple of trips to Maine, and a couple of rides on the WW&F to kick-start my brain to the point that I realized that I was heading in the wrong direction — along with the acquisition of a couple of the Bachmann On30 Forneys. I initially reasoned that they would be “appropriate” for my railroad, since the operations would have been “similar” if there had been narrow gauge on the Eastern Shore, but I still wasn’t satisfied.

Other issues with Eastern Shore modeling in a small space is that there’s no easy way to hide fact that the layout has to turn a sharp corner every few feet. In Maine, there are bona-fide hills that can be used to disguise a layout corner, and provide a geographical reason for the railroad to make a curve. I also dispensed with the idea of making the room multi-purpose. It’s now going to be strictly a model railroad room, which will house my layout, my On30 modules and my working area. A sketch of my new track plan is below (you can click the image to see a larger version):

There are a few revisions yet to be made, but, conceptually, this will be the plan. I’m going to re-arrange the small yard and limestone loading business at the upper right, and the two-track pier in the wharf area will be flipped and moved to allow for a little more interesting operation and modeling there.

The large yard at the bottom of the plan will utilize two of the three existing yard modules (an aerial view of the yard layout is here). I decided not to use the third (turntable) module as part of the layout, since the primary road power on the railroad will be the Forneys, which were designed to operate as well backward as forward. Even so, the yard is a little overwhelming when compared to the rest of the layout, but I still really like the design and operating concept of the yard.

There’s one place that may cause some issue if I use the Peco flex track and switches: the tail of the run-around on the peninsula in the center of the layout is going to be just long enough for one engine or one car, and the run-around itself is a little on the short side. Since Peco doesn’t make curved On30 turnouts, I have to take a different route, so-to-speak, or be limited in that area of the railroad. For that reason, I’ll probably go to hand-laid track for the non-modular areas of the layout. Standard turnouts will likely use the Pecos I have on hand, modified to be installed on wood ties.

Now I just have to get back to those modules — Kimberton’s coming at me again!