Hello everyone. I've been a longtime member of this board but haven't posted much as I haven't felt I've had much to add to the discussions. I'm extremely grateful of everyone who has shared their projects here and would like to share the construction of my own layout as I make progress. Today I mounted the first 3 sections of what will eventually become my representation of the Norfolk & Western Railway around Williamson WV circa 1949. While I am striving for a realistic and historically accurate reproduction, it will not be 100% true or 100% to scale. We all have to practice the art of compression, although I have strived to minimize this where I can. I've also selected to include some buildings that were finished in 1950 and a few that were already torn down by 1949 - call it artistic license. These sections will be the main part of the town of Williamson, with the freight and passenger stations along with the warehouse district that was rail served. I have strived to reproduce the rail plans where I have documentation, although some deference has been made to operating a model railroad. Here is the track plan for this area of layout: After getting the trackwork built for this section, I plan to add some temporary reversing loops on both ends so that I can run trains. I like long trains, prototypical passengers trains with 2 to 11 cars and coal trains with 40 or more cars. These take space to run and that is the goal of the layout. Once I get some basic scenery done for the town, I know I'll want to expand to build the yard and engine servicing facilities. The plans are all drawn up I know that those are really the core of my layout. I started with the town because of where it goes in the basement makes it a logical starting point.
I like the backdrop you have in place. Thanks for sharing this - it will be interesting to see this come together!
You have a great theme and are off to a fine start. Your build will be fun to watch. I've been to Williamson only a time or two. Shot these 04/12/1988 when coal was still king. Happily, the depot survives as the Town Hall I think.
Great plan and backdrop! I see where you have room for a reversing loop on the near end, but what about the far end? Will the layout be detachable from the wall?
It is firmly attached to the wall. The door you see is to a closet under the stairs. There will be a near 180 degree U turn in the closet and it will come out the other side of the door. This is where the temporary return loop will reside until I build the engine servicing facility and yard that will join there. The other end of the layout (from where the picture was taken) will eventually continue on to a scene with the main line snaking along the river. Big plans, it will take me a very long time for them to come to fruition, but then again, I've been planning this in one form or another for over 30 years.
Slow progress. It's amazing what some of the people here accomplish in a week or two. For me, I've built another module (66" x 34") that will complete this section and bring the total length up to about 20'. I've also managed to complete the sub-roadbed for the first three modules. I use the term module, but this layout is not designed to be mobile. However, if I do have to leave this location, the scenery and track can be cut at the junctions of the modules which can be unbolted and relocated in sections no bigger than 4' x 8'. So here's a couple pictures of the sub-roadbed and one of two locations where a road has an underpass. Tonight, I plan on pulling down 25% of the backdrop in order to get a large bubble out. I have to install another ERP board and another 10' section of backdrop before I can mount the fourth module. Hanging the backdrop (with wallpaper paste) has been an incredibly frustrating operation. It's a very durable vinyl and holds up to the abuse but the bubbles come out of nowhere days after putting it up.
I already like the backdrop - that is going to look great with the setting and the way you have the benchwork coming together!
A bit of a milestone. I've the completed the benchwork and subroadbed for phase 1 of my construction. Sorry for the tape on the backdrop. It takes a long time for the wallpaper paste to dry and I'm paranoid about it curling up on the edges. The angle of the lighting makes it look very uneven from this angle, it looks better from a normal perspective, not perfect, but good enough. That's about 20' long by 34" wide. I thought I'd pass on a couple points that I've learned along the way. 1.) Too much wall paper paste is a bad thing. 2.) Transferring what was so nicely laid out on the computer screen in SCARM to the real world takes a few steps. In my case, I printed it all out (yes on 8.5x11 sheets) and taped it all together, then cut it along the edges of the component pieces of my construction. From there, I used push pins to mark the plywood and then a 1/4" square by 7' long batten to draw the curves connecting the points. So I'm off to start making more turnouts, code 55 #10s with help of Fast Tracks jigs. There are 23 of them in this phase of construction, so that'll keep me busy for a while.
Thanks for the pictures. I have a few from only a few years later on the first of two visits I made there. I live in northern Illinois so it's a bit of a trek there. The yard will be phase 2 of my construction. It was the layout of the engine servicing area that really drew me into this particular area. I don't think anywhere illustrates the dedication to coal fired steam power and the streamlining of the servicing of the locomotives better than Williamson. It had its own coal mine across the river to supply its coal wharf to load the tenders, it's own water treatment plant, and a near assembly line flow for the locomotives to get serviced. The mine will be phase 3 or 4. That will certainly be a ways off though...
You're welcome. I didn't know of the details you described in your post. So cool. The N&W set a standard on locomotive servicing efficiency, Lubritoriums and all. On the same day, I took this less-than-ideal shot of Williamson's engine terminal.
I'm curious how/why you decided on your method of layout construction. Did you consider other methods? How do you plan to construct terrain off-track? I'm not criticizing your choices; I'm just interested in factors that went into a decision that is right for you. Your work is splendid, as well as heck-for-stout!
When I was a kid, I built an 4x8 HO layout with foam board and paper mache. It had way too much track and the scenery consisted of a town at one end and a "mountain," complete with tunnels, at the other. A few years ago, I helped a friend build a far nicer N scale 12x15 room layout. It had a plywood boxframe base and was built up on 1" thick foam with foam roadbed and Atlas code 55 flex track and turnouts. It turned out very nice although it hasn't been completed yet. There were two aspects of that layout construction that I didn't like. 1.) Everything seemed to be at one level or another. Things were too flat, even if they were on different levels. The boards of foam were just too tempting to create flat spaces. As you can tell from the backdrop, this part of West Virginia is decidedly not flat. Even though the towns (and rail lines) are in the bottom of the valleys, nothing is flat. One street to the next may be off by less than a 1/2" scaled but I didn't want to fall into the trap of a flat foam board valley with hills on each end. So roads will eventually go in with plywood bases and platforms will be created for buildings (or blocks of buildings) and the hills will be formed with a lattice of cardboard covered with (probably) plaster cloth. 2.) Laying the track on my friend's layout went quite well but when something needed adjusting, I found it difficult to tweak because the foam base didn't give a secure foothold for anything. It was plenty secure for supporting the track when glued down as long as everything was perfect. Trying to level things off or make a perfect alignment became difficult after the initial layout. This was probably exacerbated by the springiness of Atlas's flex track. I'm using Micro Engineering code 55 track for my layout that stays put more when bent. The plywood and cork roadbed will allow the use of nails, spikes, screws, glue etc. to ease a rail into the proper alignment if it decides to be ornery. One other factor that affected my overall design was the inability of many N scale steam locomotives to pull significant numbers of cars up an incline. My Walthers Y3 wouldn't think about hauling 40 coal cars up even a 1% grade on my friend's layout. The Bachmann J is much better but the Y is supposed to be the workhorse. I haven't tested the new BLI Y6b on an incline but I think it would do much better. Regardless, significant inclines are right out. My hidden staging areas (east and west ends of the eventual layout) will overlap with a clearance of 2" between them. There won't be a more than 0.4% grade anywhere on the layout.
