The White River and Northern Model Railroad: Chapter 6

	The N Scale

	Model Railroad

Chapter 6: WR&N Version IV

The one where the trains actually ran*

Humbled by my previous defeat, I elected not to tread so far out into unexplored territory that I would again be unable to accomplish the original goal of running trains. So, I retreated to the more conventional concept of a simple L-shaped shelf plan. With little more than a rough pencil sketch in hand, I attached a series of large shelf brackets to the walls and placed two-by-eight-foot, two-inch-thick sheets of foam insulation panels onto the brackets.

Within one afternoon I had essentially completed the basic benchwork. As before, I sliced up more foam insulation to create the subroadbed and, using a homemade hot wire carving tool, roughed-in some scenery shapes. The insulation material was assembled into a "big blue layer cake" with foam-compatible Liquid Nails. After just a couple of weekends, I was already ready to lay track!

At this point I realized some of the many benefits of this straightforward approach to layout construction: I had originally given no thought whatsoever to how I would get the "floating doughnut" out of the condo when I moved—it would have had to be completely destroyed! At least my new ultra-lightweight shelf layout could possibly be split into two sections and carried out of the room more or less intact (even though this did not happen—but I'm getting ahead of myself here).

The track plan was conceptually the same as the previous version: the WR&N was a tourist line/freight handler that interchanged with Conrail. In its revised form, though, I took a more realistic approach to the design, inspired by some real-life settings. Two former New Jersey railroads run in parallel through central New Jersey: the Lehigh Valley and the Jersey Central. Presently, one is abandoned and the other is (or was at the time) Conrail, with which the Black River and Western interchanged at Three Bridges, near Flemington.

In layout form, the WR&N was headquarted in the fictional industrial town of Pennwell. The name was a cross between Pennington and Hopewell, two New Jersey towns in which I'd lived while growing up, although neither town was industrial; its appearance was patterned after parts of Trenton. The WR&N route comprised a former industrial spur of the Lehigh, a Lehigh/CNJ interchange, and a portion of abandoned CNJ mainline. Much like its real-life counterpart in Ringoes, New Jersey, the WR&N terminus featured an engine facility, diminutive station, and quasi-museum of railroad artifacts (a large collection of junk in various stages of restoration or deterioration).

With the introduction of Micro Engineering's beautiful code 55 turnouts that same year, I was able to ditch my plan for handlaid turnouts. Thus, to the great relief and delight of both myself and my wife, I had track down and trains running within a few weekends, which provided lots of time to pursue the most appealing aspect of model railroading: detailing. It wasn't long before the yard area was finished, right down to the weeds, and if I'm far enough along to plant weeds, I'm in my glory.

Then a curious thing took place. Rick Spano's Sceniced and Undecided was being photographed for a feature in Great Model Railroads. I helped him prep the layout for the photo shoot, during which Rick talked Lou Sassi, the photographer, into visiting my layout. He was rather reluctant at first, given that I had so little to show. But ultimately Rick pestered him into a brief visit.

Within about two minutes of seeing the WR&N yard, Lou asked how much could be finished within one year, when he planned a return trip to shoot the layout. I had no idea! So I just threw out a guess that maybe three-quarters might be ready by then. Inside I was in a panic: How was I ever going to get that much work done—especially at the level of detail I sought?

And then an even stranger thing happened, one of those good news/bad news situations: I was laid off from work. While this put a serious dent in my income, it did afford me a lot of unexpected spare time in which to work on the railroad.

Construction then accelerated to a break-neck pace. Sadly, in order to keep the progress steady, I took more shortcuts than I would have otherwise—relying on kits more than scratchbuilding, making ad hoc changes in the plan's design, skipping certain key components that were not visible (such as a hidden staging yard), and so on.

Despite the shortcuts and extra available time, I had only finished about half of the layout by the time Lou returned. But it was enough, as far as he was concerned, because the level of detail was very high, and so there was plenty to shoot. I'd also made some movable scenery chunks that could be placed to disguise unfinished areas, so he could shoot almost anywhere. Indeed, the portable forests appear somewhere in almost every shot.

By the way, if I look a little bleary-eyed in the magazine portrait, it's because I was working on the layout around the clock for about a week before Lou's arrival. I was very nearly asleep on my feet by the time he got me under those painfully bright lights.

Bringing the layout to this point provided a tremendous amount of experience developing and refining a great many model-building techniques—as you might be able to tell by this veritable cornucopia of clinics that emerged from this era, many of which also feature more images of the layout:

The layout may have been very good in the eyes of most modelers, but it was disappointing to me. All of my shortcuts glared at me; worse, some of the most detailed scenes ended up located too far away or otherwise obscured from direct view. For example, a building with a working barber pole and a chaser light sign wound up at the back of the layout; the gas station's repair bay, which was super-detailed and featured an animated car lift, was turned 90 degrees to the normal viewing angle. These kinds of features should all have been right under the visitors' noses—almost literally.

By contrast, other areas of the layout came out as good as I might have hoped. The yard, in particular, was very satisfying, principally with respect to its trackwork. It was the first area I brought to completion, and it reflected the level of craftsmanship I sought. (The yard also featured the layout's oldest detail—inherited from Version I!)

While the photo shoot was over, layout construction was not going to let up, for I was then asked if I could open for an NMRA layout tour. Yikes! I had to figure out how to let two huge busloads of visitors see a layout in a room that could hold at most maybe six or seven people at a time.

But just to complicate matters even further, my second wife left me. Still unemployed, my life had been thrown into such turmoil that I began a long slide into a complete emotional collapse that would result in a number of bizarre and unfortunate events...

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*This chapter, together with its associated clinics and detail pages, represents a greatly expanded and updated version of the Great Model Railroads 2000 article, "Let's Try This Again!"

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