Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads
A hobby adventure
I made a road trip recently to visit a few Pre-Depression Era modelers here in the great Southwest. I had been threatening to visit one of them for a couple of years and the timing worked out. It was a lot of driving across miles and miles and miles of desert, but it was worth it!
As a railroad modeler, I answer many questions about this hobby. A regular question from other modelers has been, why model 1926? This sounds simple, doesn’t it? Just explain why I model a specific year. Oddly, I’ve been trying to write this for three weeks and it comes up a little different with each new version. I think I finally like how this has turned out so I better post it before I change my mind, again. Besides, I have models to build!
In May, I returned to Morgantown, WV, to celebrate with my daughter and daughter-in-law as they received degrees from West Virginia University. Before hitting the road, I contacted Michael Hohn to coordinate a visit. Michael and I have been long time members of the Mon Valley Railroad Historical Society, and we have bounced home layout ideas around. A visit date was set up quickly.
Recent Internet searches have led me to a new string of customers that were served by the Wheeling Freight Terminal. It seems wrong to call these the product of a search as I actually just stumbled into related details. Note the tall buildings in the background of the image above. These structures constituted a block that all had docks along the tail track that accessed the team yard. I had wondered about these buildings before, but there was little info at hand when the layout was being designed in 2012. Click on any image here to review a larger size.
As has been confirmed on the recent Model Railcast Show, I’ve chosen the Baltimore & Ohio Wheeling Freight Terminal layout design for my next project. Overall the smaller scope of the project just seemed to fit the room better than the sinewy Wheeling & Lake Erie line that winds through industrial Newburgh, Ohio. I do hope to model that line at some point, but this space is just shy a couple of feet in both directions make it work well. The narrow 15 inch benchwork of the Newburgh design meets the railroad operating needs but limits the scenic scope of the urban fabric that is a mutual component of that rail corridor. I will put those ideas aside for now and hope they can be reconsidered in another house a year or two down the line.