The White River and Northern Model Railroad: Detail

	The N Scale

	Model Railroad

Evolution of a track plan

Since it would be years before the basement would be ready for a layout, I had plenty of time to plan. Naturally the plans changed over time, and the three surviving sketches illustrate this process well. The first pencil sketch, for example, revealed a rigid, rectilinear design to the left of the canyon area; the city of Fresnel was at right angles to the wall. The Bearcamp logging camp did not yet exist as an idea at this point. To help differentiate the mainline from other trackage, I traced over it with a marker; the general mainline route barely changed from the first draft through the final plan, although there were plenty of other revisions.

Over time I realized that the orientation of the city section would create cramped aisle space and sharper mainline curves into and out of the area, and the next generation showed how I had addressed this problem by swinging the section out into the unused space above it. I was also playing around with ideas about hidden loopbacks for the industrial switching line. And there was a very brief flirtation with the notion of extending the layout around the corner of the workshop to the upper left, as revealed by the pencil scribbles; this would have required a removable section to provide access to the workshop door, and so was dropped. But the idea of converting what was going to be a row of storage cabinets in the space along the upper right into the Bearcamp logging area was beginning to coalesce.

Although the switching line loopback idea was abandoned, other subtle changes, such as making the interurban line parallel to the yard-doubling mirror in the lower left, were retained. By the time I was ready to put the "final draft" stamp on the plan, the Fresnel city section had swung out even further (benchwork design for this oddly-angled area was aided with an early form of CAD). I had also done away with the "control panel hump" in the lower center, as well as all straight, finished edges in the aisles. The design for Bearcamp was fully realized, and the fact that it was so isolated from the rest of the layout served as the genesis for the daring concept of representing different eras and seasons on the same layout.

Many mirrors were planned to expand the apparent space. In particular, Fresnel was braced by parallel mirrors to create an "endless" city. The mirror at the right end of Fresnel was actually double-sided so that someone standing in the White River Junction area would see a reflection of the canyon walls toward the upper center area. Other mirrors included a small one at right angles to the left-end Fresnel mirror, two small mirrors within the city to extend the streets, the yard-doubling mirror at the left end of the yards in Mattam, a steel mill-doubling mirror at the bottom center of the plan, and one at the right end of Bearcamp. They are indicated above by heavy black lines.

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