How we got here

 

How we got here

This is the story of the final model railroad I expect to build.  It will be the 7th of my "career", spanning 45 years.  This first post tells the history of that career from the first days in England until now.  Most of this blog will be about the final layout but it gives me an opportunity to share some of my experiences and thinking about model railroads over my whole history.  I've learned a lot but never got close to finishing a layout.  It's taught me what I like and what I want, though. But I'm still a rookie and I'll need to learn a lot more if I'm to meet my goals with this layout.   More about that later.  First, some history!

Layout 1 - GWR

This is the little locomotive that started it all for me in England in 1975.  Its a Great Western Railway 0-6-0 Saddle Tank engine,  It may be one of the most popular "N" scale locomotives in the UK.  The GWR was the romantic dream of young railfan kids in the UK in the late 20th century.  Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the railway in the 1800s.   The Saddle Tank (known in the UK as a  "Pannier tank") was unique to the GWR and the stuff of "Little Engine that Could" stories for youngsters.  It was mainly used for local passenger and freight service.  With a young family, it was all I could afford at the time - I think it cost about $40.  It ran on a 17' x 15" point to point shelf layout down the side of my single-car garage - no basements in England!  It was focused on GWR passenger operations and had two levels (I had to have a tunnel somewhere in the layout.). At one end was a four-track terminus station with a complex series of switches in the throat (disaster in "n" scale in 1975).  A lead to the servicing facility on the upper level left the station and created the tunnel over the double-track main line below it.

Layout 2 - Burlington Northern

Fast forward a few years to the USA - 1981 in fact.  A basement for the first time and an opportunity to upscale to HO.  I randomly purchased a BN hood unit of some kind - I knew so little about US railroads, I don't even know if it was an Alco, GE or EMD.  I built a double track loop that was about 7x10 with a tunnel and a single spur to a lower level. This was just a bare-bones layout so I could run a train every once in a while.  My kids weren't interested at all!

Layout 3 - Erie

About ten years later, I had purchased a house in Susquehanna County, PA, about 200 yards from the old D&H line that hauled coal up the Lackawanna Valley from the Carbondale mines. The Erie RR had trackage rights over the line and I bought a book about the Erie RR that was full of pictures including one or two from within a couple of miles of my house.  I'll find the photo that inspired me and include it in a later post.  I vowed my next model RR would be of the Erie. I voraciously consumed prototype information  for the next few months.  One of the stars of that photo was an S3 Erie 2-8-4 Berkshire which since then, has been my favorite locomotive "of all time".  It inspired my second HO layout in my basement in Connecticut. (More in a later post).  This was my first attempt to simulate a prototype railroad.

Layout 4 - Housatonic

Fast forward a few years to Connecticut and the Housatonic RR in the Berkshire Hills on the borders with Massachusetts and New York states.  Another story of inspiration for a model RR layout.  This time it was a real-life experience.  The "Housy" is a bridge line about 180 miles long that runs from Pittsfield, MA to Danbury, CT and Darien, CT.  My wife, Da, and I came across it on a day out  and followed it for a while.  I learned the story of this little railroad with 47 employees and decided I wanted to model it.  This became my third HO effort, this time in the basement of our house in Minneapolis in 2000. (More in a later post)

Layout 5 - Baltimore and Ohio

As son Zachary got older, he wanted to scale up.  For years, we'd been going to train shows as often as we could.  We'd also joined the Granite City O-Gaugers (GCOG) who run an O-gauge three rail layout 

For a five-year-old, HO is too small and wasn't reliable enough to be fun. So once he reached 10 years old, we bought him an O-gauge  Rail King B&O train for his birthday.  We used the same layout base tables  as we had for the Housy but installed a different track configuration for trains twice the size.  We had fun with it for a while but Zachary's exposure to the GCOG members, train shows and his own voracious appetite for research dove us in a different direction.

Layout 6 - Lionel postwar

We stuck with O-gauge but started collecting and running Lionel postwar trains on postwar track.  We adapted the layout base tables and so we would have room for the many "accessories" (toy working industries) we could get.  Zachary led the way but it took me a while to catch up with him and start my own collection. Which brings us to November 2020.  We're both selling our collections.  Zach is building HO models and is modeling the Soo line that runs near our house in Plymouth - funny how we want to model what's close to us!  I'm dismantling the whole layout in Plymouth and starting on this final layout 

Layout 7 - Modern O Scale

For many years, I've loved the Camelback locomotive.  There aren't any postwar examples to be found so I weakened a couple of years ago and bought a modern version at the big train show in Wheaton, IL  I had considered it a part of my postwar collection, even though it's modern.  When I came to sell the collection, I even had it listed on eBay but after a few days decided I couldn't part with it.  That coupled with a realization of what I'm looking for from a layout after all these years, inspired me to start planning the final layout.  More on that in the next post.