Well, I haven't done much with this blog in a while. That's OK. Model Railroading is my armchair hobby for the time being. Although that may change sooner than you'd think; my daughter is getting married at the end of the month, and we'll become effectively empty nesters. With the exception of two college-age boys who will technically have their permanent address at our house, but who won't actually be here much. They're both out of state out West. Lucky chumps.
When she leaves, we'll do a lot of reorganization in to our "semi-empty-nester mode" housing situation. Her bedroom will become a kind of small office or library. A bunch of stuff in the basement (where I work, most of the time) will be thrown out, hopefully including a bench set that nobody uses and a treadmill nobody has used in years, which will facilitate making a lot of space available in the back half of the basement living area. This could potentially be a railroad area, if I decide that I'm ready to commit to that. I mean, don't hold your breath. It'll be months before the house is ready to even entertain making that space, and I haven't even talked to my wife yet about whether or not that's how we want to use the space either. And getting set up with a railroad isn't super expensive, but it ain't cheap either, and our budget may well be recovering from this wedding for a year or more. Not to mention other home improvement projects that desperately need doing. New carpets. New bathrooms. New siding. New drywall in the basement, etc.
Rather than looking at 2023 as the year I start modeling, I see it as likely the year that we start staging the house in such a way that modeling could happen in 2024-5 at the earliest.
I'm also thinking about scaling back my ambitious plans for three 4x8s. Certainly that will never fit in our current house, and it looks like we're going to be staying here longer than we thought; another good decade at the least, and maybe closer to two before we can think about moving into a retirement house somewhere that we really want to live unfettered from the need to live near work. I'm now thinking two 4x8s connected via a 2xn bridge (probably less than 8 feet like I had originally planned. Four or maybe a little more seems more doable) into a loose upside down U shape. I'm still very interested in a Trans-Pecos West Texas desert environment (possibly with more dramatic than realistic canyons and cliffs) on the Jerome & Southwestern trackplan for the first 4x8. The bridging section will have a more "urban" railtown with a bayou built in just for the scenic variety, and the second 4x8 will feature classic Rocky Mountain-like scenery. I haven't decided on a trackplan, but this is a good suggestion of a place to build off of. I have others too, though.
I like how this one has the loop doing some crazy things rather than just going around in a circle. This is like a folded in on itself figure eight. The loop is much longer than it appears at first glance.
That big spur going off into the corner could even be adapted as one of the connecting tracks from the bridging section. I like the idea of it not necessarily just connecting to the loop right away in a predictable fashion.
In other words, it's two 4x8 railroads connected to each other by a bridging section, with slightly different themes. The desert theme will be focused on stock cars, mining, and LTL and team track stuff, with oil being an industry referenced, but slightly off stage.
The Rocky Mountain section will have logging and mining and by logging I also mean lumber processing, i.e., a sawmill, even if it's a small mom and pop one along with, of course, LTL service. The LTL is a big part of the whole idea; Ruritanian America is non-corporatized, and businesses are smaller and usually privately owned. Railroads are also smaller and privately owned, but have to handle a more diverse bunch of smaller businesses shipping smaller loads.
That said, strict realism is hardly one of my goals. Long time modelers will probably say that such small, private short-line railroads would use narrow gauge and low profile rails. Screw that. I'm using Code 100 standard gauge track because it's cheaper, more readily available, and easier to maintain. And THAT is exactly the spirit of the non-corporatized railroads, even if the result is... somewhat unexpected. That said, I'm not thrilled with the kind of model railroading Karens who run around worrying about rail height and other functions like that, as I've said before.
I may cut down my planned 5-6 locos to just two or three, actually. The Heisler is readily available, if the Climax seems to constantly be out of stock everywhere. I can get it on the used market, along with Shays, but because they're older, they don't seem to be DCC compatible. Maybe that's OK. With a smaller layout and fewer locos, and the likelihood that I'm the only person who will ever run trains on it, other than for staged photo ops, what do I really need more than one train at a time for? Why not just have a regular and simpler and easier DC system with a booster power pack or two because of the size? I'll need to do some electrical blocking anyway for a reverse loop or two.
And if I don't care anymore about DCC, maybe I can even downgrade one of my planned 0-6-0s to an 0-4-0. Or maybe I'll have one of each and the Heisler. Or... I dunno. I am finding that DC is still more common, in spite of the fact that all of the magazine discussion is all in on DCC. Given my scope, I'm really starting to lean in to DC vs DCC. Much cheaper, simpler.
Anyway, I'll talk some more in the next few weeks, I hope, about the second loop and whatever changes to the bridging section that I intend to make. If I cut the bridging section down from a planned 2x8 to a 2x3 or 2x4, I'll have to reduce it, obviously, and it'll have less switching and yard-like options and more just getting from one railroad to the next as well as less ambitious scenic goals. But that'll certainly fit better, and will probably be a necessity for real life, if I'm assuming that I'm designing a railroad that I could actually build in a few years.
An obvious thing here is that my pseudo-Appalachian loop will be cut completely. There won't be any smaller, rounder, forested Eastern mountain ranges, just the more jagged, wilder Western Rocky Mountain-like ranges. Although the mountains will be more in the backdrop than in the layout itself, of course—even in a mountain themed railroad, actual really big mountains, cliffs and canyons are naturally constrained by what you can do. John Allen did more than almost anyone else with scenery that literally went from the floor to the ceiling. I certainly won't do that much.
But losing the Appalachian area, which is the obvious coal-mining region, is why I'm on the fence about if I'm going to have coal mines or not. If I don't, that's OK. Not every railroad needs a coal mine, even if it runs on coal. There are coal mines out west, but it's generally lower quality coal that's strip-mined, not Appalachian-style mines. But I'll see what I end up wanting to do about that. I don't need a million industries. A couple per loop and one on the bridging section gives me plenty to work with, if I also have team tracks and LCL docks with old-fashioned depot shipping. Add to that the possibility of a passenger car or two in some trains, and I've got plenty of activities modeled to keep the trains busy.
