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The N Scale |
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Model Railroad |
Chapter 3: WR&N Version I
Logging railroad in a coffee table
Each time I returned home from working with Rick on his Sceniced and Undecided, my Newport and Rock Falls looked increasingly amateurish and crude. Finally, in my senior year of high school, the N&RF, which by then had grown to four by ten feet, bit the dust.
Inspired
by an article in a back-issue of Model Railroader ("Railroad in a coffee table?" by Bill Baron, June 1966),
my new layout began in 1973 as a three-foot-diameter circular slab of plywood. Its name chosen as a twist on the
Black River and Western, the White River and Northern was a teensy-weensy fictional
New England logging line that existed primarily to serve a single industry: the Stephen A. Greene Charcoal Company, named for
a wonderful elderly gentleman from Rhode Island who I'd adopted as the grandfather I never had.
Work progressed at a deliberately slow pace over the course of the six years I spent at college, principally because everything except the track and locomotives was built from scratch, right down to the Jack Work style pine trees (Model Railroader, May 1958). It looked as good as I could have hoped, and in the course of photographing it, I began to hone my camera skills—which included my first forays into pinhole photography (there's another dozen images of the layout in this clinic).
Some time after graduating college (where, incidentally, my hobby influenced my studies), I moved out of my parents' home, but despite its decidedly portable size, the WR&N—by then nearly 100% cosmetically complete—did not make the move with me. I had no regrets about abandoning it, for it served its purpose well: it was a tremendous learning experience that gave me years of enjoyment. It's just that I wanted to graduate to bigger, better modeling, as in a full-sized permanent home layout. What I didn't know at the time was that the opportunity for such a thing would not come for another seven years...
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