Great Model Railroads 2019

WE DON’T PLAN to give a theme to each year’s edition of Great Model Railroads. We simply pick the best layout articles to come across our desk. Sometimes, though, a theme happens to emerge on its own. This year, it seems the theme is compact layouts. Now, we’re aware that small model railroads are a popular topic with our readers; we’ve published issues of Model Railroader collecting several articles on that topic. But we swear it didn’t occur to us until we saw this issue’s articles pinned up on the meeting room walls that we noticed so many of the layouts were spare-room-sized or smaller. We didn’t plan it that way, I swear. But if we had planned this issue to prove the idea that small model railroads can be great model…

LOS ANGELES ISN’T ONE homogenous place. As with any large city, it’s a mosaic of neighborhoods, suburbs, regions, and incorporated jurisdictions, each with its unique look and vibe. Nestled in that patchwork is Vernon, home of the Los Angeles Junction Ry. (also known as LAJ, the Junction, or the “J”). Unless you’re a railfan, Vernon, Calif., isn’t going to be on your short list of vacation destinations. Not only is it, shall we say, “glamour challenged,” but it’s had a long and colorful political history. In a May 2011 article, L.A. Weekly said Vernon “may be the most corrupt five square miles in California.” But if the LAJ has one thing, it’s character. Flanking both sides of the Los Angeles River, the J is a spiderweb network of industrial spurs weaving through…

While the diesel-era setting of Ken Thompson’s Burlington Northern Peoria Subdivision might make it seem like any other HO scale model railroad, his prototype is steeped in history, being one of the first lines built in Illinois during the Westward Expansion. In the late 1840s and into the 1850s, a web of railroads was being built westward from Chicago and other hubs. The little-known Peoria & Oquawka RR was chartered by the state of Illinois in 1849. The line was laid out and built from Peoria, Ill., through Galesburg to Oquawka. It was completed on Feb. 1, 1857. During the 1860s, several railroads, including the P&O, were consolidated to form the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. On March 2, 1970, the CB&Q joined the Great Northern; Northern Pacific; and Spokane, Portland &…

KEN USES A PLAYING-CARD SYSTEM to randomly determine the destinations of his freight cars. Each operating session, a card is drawn from the deck for every car on the layout. The value of the card is compared to a chart to find its destination. The chart lists destinations appropriate for the type of car. If the car is being unloaded at an industry, a black card indicates it’s still being unloaded; a red card says it’s now empty and ready to be routed to the destination shown in the “Empties To” column of the chart. An empty being loaded at an industry is still being loaded if a red card is drawn; a black card says the car has been loaded and is ready to be sent to the destination in…

WHEN SCOTT TEAGUE’S N scale Norfolk Southern Pocahontas Division first appeared in Great Model Railroads 2004, the layout was a single level with 436 feet of double-tracked main line. Since then, Scott has almost doubled the size of the railroad by adding a second deck with an additional 198 feet of branch line and a third level of staging. Scott has been a model railroader for more than 25 years. The Pocahontas Division is his fourth layout. After watching the prototype in action back in 1995, he decided to replicate it in N scale. “I wanted a big-time heavy NS route, and fell in love with the Pocahontas Division the first time I saw it,” he said. That meant re-creating era-appropriate heavy coal and freight operations hauled by Electro-Motive Division SD40-2s, General…

WHEN THERE’S NOT ENOUGH ROOM for a three-dimensional building, I use photos of actual buildings that are sized to scale. The photos I used were made by a company called Radical Flatts (which is no longer in business). I laminated the photos to a sheet of black Gator Board (www.gator-board.com) and cut them out with a hobby knife. Three-dimensional details like loading docks, awnings, and signs add to the realism. They work well in small spaces on the layout [see photo 5 to the left].…