Finally- I got the PMHS Periodicals page up to date- I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more with the blog until the PMHS web site was updated…
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We’ve turned the corner and moved into what I hope will be the last house we will live in- the house my wife, Leslie, grew up in. We moved in at the beginning of the year to be able to more readily help out her mother, who celebrated her 90th birthday two weekends ago and is beginning to feel some signs of her age. It was a move of a whole 4.5 miles due north.
As far as building my “lifetime layout” this is it- I was given a 20- by 25-foot section of the south end of the basement to wall off and build my layout. While I would love to have the entire basement to build the layout, there is an element of compromise in all married decisions, and besides it keeps the layout to a size that I will be able to reasonably complete within another 30 years.
I’ve decided to take an unusual tack with designing my layout- I’ve asked the guys who make up my expected crews what features they’ve liked the most about layouts we’ve worked on in the past, and decided that I will tailor my new layout to their interests as well as my own. Of the half a dozen guys I have spoken with who participate in the regularly scheduled TT&TO operating sessions on the Wabash layout, I came away from the conversations with a definite bias in favor of a layout with lots of switching and far less mainline operation.
The major theme is one that I firmly control- the Pere Marquette in western Michigan at the very end of its independent existence. This places the PM, as I model it, squarely in the 1940s. I like the more modern steam power- for example the Berkshires- and like the early diesels. Fortunately the PM was the one portion of the C&O system which dieselized early with SW1 and NW2 switchers.
Given that I have a 20 by 25 foot space, I’ve gone through some basic layout planning exercises with John Young. In just placing the various crew members around the space and applying the minimum main line radius, I found out that I cannot possibly fit 30 miles of HO model railroad in a space so small and a still fit a dozen crew. A four-person crew is much more reasonable in the space I have. The 30 miles of track is straight out, no matter how I carve up the space.
A four-person crew also better fits into an around-the-room layout design with the crew lounge in the middle, using some of the furniture we brought with us from the south side of town.
The sole trade-off in the design is that in as much as I love timetable-and-train-order operation, I will only be able to fit two offices issuing train orders on the layout, each about a scale mile from the other. As a result, we probably won’t be able to justify two operators. The reason for these two offices, I’ll leave until next time.