Model Railroad Planning

In case you hadn’t heard, Firecrown Media of Chattanooga, Tenn., purchased Kalmbach Media’s hobby magazines and books in May 2024. I was already familiar with the company, as it purchased and upgraded one of my other favorite magazines, Flying. Chief Executive Officer Craig Fuller says he’s pleased with his acquisitions, and the magazines and staff will stay in the Milwaukee area. Small layouts Those of you who have been asking for more coverage of small layouts should be especially happy with this issue: See pages 16, 56, and 80. And those of you who are building or have built shelf or bedroom-size layouts should contact me at nkpfan@ptd.net to see if what you’re doing could become a feature candidate for a future issue of MRP. If that type of model…

Life is like a mountain railroad. I can say that is a true statement. As a locomotive engineer for Norfolk Southern, my seniority district includes enough grades and curves to qualify as a mountain railroad. I’ve been at the throttle of massive trains with barely enough horsepower to conquer the hills and mountains on the line. It’s funny how life can be just like one of those trains, when things go downhill fast and then take what seems like forever to get back on top. If you’ve lived long enough, you know what I mean. Along the way, things may not always go as planned. It’s what you do afterward that matters. I can relate this to my model railroad life, too. I’ve been a model railroader for more than 40…

The Pennsylvania RR is something I’ve modeled in various forms for a long time. My father introduced me to model railroading at a young age, and as a teenager in the 1980s, we built a layout based on his beloved South Australian Rys. that we operated together for many years. Back then, Australian prototype models were hard to come by, often only available as limited run and rudimentary resin kits. In the early 1990s, I was seduced by the range and ready availability of U.S.-prototype models in HO, and having been gifted a book on the PRR, the die was cast. Over the years, I’ve produced a few temporary PRR-themed layouts. When my wife and I bought our first home in 2013, I built my first “proper” layout in a…

Mike Evans is building a prototypical HO layout based on the Delaware & Hudson’s Rutland Branch in the basement of his grandparents restored 1804 farmhouse in Plattsburgh, N.Y. He started planning the Whitehall & Rutland in the early 2000s and has been working at it steadily ever since. Mike has a great story of how this came about. I first met Mike when he owned a hobby shop in Plattsburgh in the early 1990s. Although Plattsburgh was out of my way on the other side of Lake Champlain, I always stopped there whenever I got a chance to shoot the bull and pick up treasures. Mike did custom painting then, and he painted my first brass locomotive, a Rutland Ten-Wheeler, which was and is my favorite locomotive. It’s still in…

How many model railroaders can say they’ve built their dream layout? I’m pleased to count myself in the lucky few. My 1925-era On30 Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington RR fulfilled a dream that had laid dormant for nearly 25 years. Finding an inspiration I got into model railroading later than many folks. I was in my late 20s when I picked up some used N scale equipment at a local train shop. It was a tough time for N scalers back in the late 1970s. The equipment was crude, and poor-running locomotives were the norm. My interest changed when I found a book in a local hobby shop: Two Feet to Tidewater by David Register and Robert Jones. It was the story of the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington, a 2-foot gauge line…

For several years, my wife, Diane, and I have considered adding a sunroom onto to the back of our house. Finally, in early 2021, we asked ourselves, what are we waiting for? Both in our mid 60s, we figured that if we were ever going to do it, now was the time. A local contractor was consulted, and plans were drawn up, with construction to begin that summer. Following one of our monthly operating sessions on my 1:72 Colorado & Southern Clear Creek District layout, featured in Model Railroad Planning 2018, I told my operating crew about the house addition coming in a couple months. One of the guys asked, “You are putting a basement under the addition, aren’t you?” I probably had a blank look on my face when…