The Gears Are Turning
Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about my modeling options here in the new house. The space I have available is a roughly 10′x’7 space in the single car garage. Conveniently, the house we’re renting seems to have a finished garage. All of the walls and ceiling are insulated and drywalled, edges are trimmed with moldings, and it’s even painted to match the rest of the house. We’ll never use it for parking so the garage door will only open whenever I go take the mower out come Spring.
I first thought about doing a modular style layout, then considered your typical 30/36″x80″ door layout as well for the space I have.
And then I saw this:
http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=3613
A quick google also returned two little articles about it:
http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=3614
It’s the new “Salt Lake Route” N-Scale project layout that Model Railroader is kicking off in their January 2010 issue, which should arrive in my mailbox soon.
It’s a 4′x9′ modern-era layout that fits almost into what the original Elmwood sub was. A modern, Union Pacific railroad with a city scene and mountain scene. I was already planning to most likely do a doubletrack plan, and this one jsut so happens to also be double tracked.. It’s like a perfect match, heh.
The mininum radius of 10″ might be a little tight for my taste, so I may widen that narrow end of the plan a bit. It appears it’ll be Kato-Unitrack based too, but I’m planning on using Atlas/ME Code 55 flex-track.
So it looks like I have starting point for my new layout, The Salt Lake Route. I’m anxiously awaiting my next MRR magazin to arrive to read about this layout and get this rolling again.
Stay Tuned!
Image: Model Railroader Magazine (trains.com)
I saw that article too in the latest MR and thought it was an interesting layout, particularly the use of an intermodal terminal, not something you usually see in MR. Don’t know about the southwestern scenery, maybe you could make that winding through wetlands to put it in Louisiana?
Yup, certainly a possibility to have that track wind through a swamp or along the spillway for a more local scene. Almost all the Class I lines running out of New Orleans probably run through such scene.
That southwestern stuff is usually more desert-y looking, so a slight shift of locale might be good because I do want have some greenery and trees and such.
I also like the idea of the intermodal terminal too. I’ve always liked the look of the them on other layout.
And you said moving home was the end of an era . . .
I received my MR JAN 2010 on Monday and went straight to that article. I plan on doing about a 3×4 area of my layout with Intermodal so this helped me. Glad to see you’ll be doing a layout and keeping this site going. It’s the best N Scale site I’ve seen.