At Long Last

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Mountain Man

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Jan 19, 2007
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OK - found two trackplans in an OLD magazine that are small, well-suited to an initial N-scale layout and with best elements that are easily combinable and "bashable"...and based on my preferred time period!

Who would have thunk it?! I suppose pretty soon I'll have to buy a bleeping digital camera just to keep up. :cool:
 
Mountain Man said:
OK - found two trackplans in an OLD magazine that are small, well-suited to an initial N-scale layout and with best elements that are easily combinable and "bashable"...and based on my preferred time period!

Who would have thunk it?! I suppose pretty soon I'll have to buy a bleeping digital camera just to keep up. :cool:
Click to expand...

Glad to hear you found a suitable layout to build. I hope you get a digital so you can share your results with us.

Just so you don't think of a digital camera as just "keeping up", I think I should share how come I bought one. My other hobby is hot rods and muscle cars. I went to the "Route 66 Rendezvous" in San Bernardino. There were about 2500 cars on display, and I shot 10 rolls of 35 mm film! After the processing, I realized that the cost of processing film would have paid for a digital camera. Now when we go on vacation I shoot pics like crazy. On a vacation to Sedona, Az I probably shot 500 pictures! With a digital, I only had the best ones printed. Of the rest, some were saved to my hard drive, some were deleted, but I didn't have to pay for processing them!
 
Well...hold the presses...while browsing through the local libary history section, I came across one of those books that no one ever checks out, containing the perfect prototype!

The right type of industry, in the right location, during the right time period but still unique...and most extraordinary of all, a real-life stretch of 8% grade! According to the book, at least two engines to get three cars up the last stretch, sometimes one engine per car! This thing has just about everything I wanted to have in my layout, and the rest is easily justifiable based on the location and terrain, AND...it's historically upgradable clear into the 90's if I so desire! Almost a century of model railroading based on a real operation.

I immediately went back to the drawing board and began altering and refining my track plan.
 
Mountain Man, have you seen a book entitled "Railroads of the Coer d'Lenes" (spelling ?). It is about railroads that operated in the mountains of Idaho before WW1. They had one picture in the book of a 2-6-6-2 that looked very close to the Mantua articulated logger with tender. It was pulling something like 6 or 10 cars and the caption under the photo said that that was the maximum load that engine could pull up the grade! I think that 2-6-6-2 was probably close to the biggest locomotive available in 1910 when the pic was taken!
 
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