WR&N Version Vb

When I struck upon the (admittedly deranged) idea of converting the living and dining rooms into a permanent layout room, I was able to greatly expand upon many of the themes of the previous plan, which itself was derived from Version IV. The plan shown here was an early draft that did not include details for the yard areas located at each end of the layout. The pale yellow shapes represent permanent walls that had been completed, right down to the paint and trim. The only access to the room was from the lower right—all other entrances had been blocked off. About half of the steel frame benchwork was finished, and I'd started installing and painting Masonite sky backdrop panels.

The gap between the layout and the wall was left to accommodate lighting for the sky backdrop, which was curved in every corner. As a throwback to Version II, two large staging yards were included to provide continuous mainline traffic. The only structure planned from the very outset was Tanna Hill Tower, a stone lookout tower based on Bowman's Hill Tower in Pennsylvania; it disguised a cable anchored to the ceiling to support the mountain ridge peninsula, which permitted me to do away with legs. There was not one single leg in the whole layout—all of the rest of the benchwork was supported by extra-heavy-duty shelf brackets anchored into wall studs.

In spite of having been designed during a period of mental instability, there are many aspects of this plan that I still really like and will probably incorporate into a future layout. In particular, the upper left area represents a region that reveals the progression real railroads often take as they evolve. An abandoned mainline route runs around the end of a mountain ridge and swings back into a valley to form a large S-curve. The mainline was subsequently realigned to run though a tunnel bored through the mountain, and across a long viaduct that spans the valley. A short portion of the abandoned route was still in use to access a siding down to a cement plant behind the viaduct in the valley. The plan was rendered in CorelDraw.

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