Model Railroad Planning 2018

Doug Tagsold is one of the most prolific modelers I’ve ever met. When he sets his sights on a goal, he moves quickly toward it, even when the way is off the beaten path. He’s modeled the Rio Grande’s Moffat Road and the D&RGW-Santa Fe Joint Line west and south of Denver, converted the Joint Line to the industrial Denver Belt, built an On3 edition of one of the Rio Grande’s slim gauge lines, and modeled the Toledo belt line scene not far from his Michigan home. Now you can read about what he’s doing today starting on page 10 [“Applying lessons learned”]. I won’t spoil his narrative by giving away the details, but I’ll admit that I fully understand what drove him back to Colorado. John Denver once sang about…

Over the past six decades I’ve built numerous layouts, beginning with my grandfather’s and father’s Lionel trains, then N scale, and then converting to HO. Each layout was a valuable learning experience as well as another step away from the first “loop of track” layout toward something that resembled a full-size railroad. College was a place for learning, both for my future family business career and for my future model railroading endeavors. I think that what I learned from Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman was just as important as the college courses. The late 1970s were when articles in MR by Jim Hediger about his Ohio Southern introduced the double-deck layout, and Allen McClelland’s seminal Virginian & Ohio series appeared in RMC. Three decades, three layouts Over the next three decades, I built…

Up to this point, I’ve not mentioned what scale this new layout is. In fact, early in the planning, I wasn’t sure what it would be. I purchased an HOn3 Blackstone locomotive and several pieces of rolling stock. The Blackstone (made by SoundTraxx) locomotives run as well as locomotives in any scale, and are reasonably priced. P-B-L makes equally great looking and running motive power and rolling stock in Sn3, albeit at considerably higher prices. During this time of indecision, I found on eBay an HO standard gauge 2-8-0 that visually looked very similar to a narrow gauge Consolidation: Athearn’s ready-to-run Old Timer 2-8-0. The former MDC/Roundhouse model has been upgraded with a precision motor and flywheel, and with electrical pickup on all drivers and tender wheels. Further searching found several of…

Over the years, I’ve collected a variety of highly detailed rolling stock for my Virginia & Western RR (see “It’s done with mirrors” in Model Railroad Planning 2017) with little consideration for the type of car. But after I was introduced to realistic operation, I realized I had far too many tank cars, refrigerator cars, and in particular anachronistic billboard reefers for an East Coast railroad set in the 1950s. With few places to spot them on the railroad, I would move them from one end of staging to the other and back again, or simply remove them from the railroad by hand. Surely there was a more creative way to use some members of my freight car fleet. Serving un-modeled industries It finally dawned on me that a car float provides an…

As a professor at the University of Illinois, I’m fond of telling students that you can’t plan your life. A great example of this is how I came to build an N scale layout inspired by the Nickel Plate Road in northern Ohio in 1957. I didn’t grow up anywhere near the NKP. As a child, I lived across the street from an Illinois Central branch line in southern Illinois. As far back as I can remember, I was fascinated by trains. In grade school, I did a little HO scale modeling of the Illinois Central but lost interest during high school. Then in 1990, after graduating from law school, working at a law firm in Georgia for several years, and then returning to Champaign, Ill., as a professor, I decided to…

Ever since I had the good fortune to operate Charlie Duckworth’s Bagnell Branch [see Model Railroad Planning 2010 – Ed.], I’ve been intrigued by out-and-back branchline operations. This prompted me to study the Minneapolis & St. Louis’ branch line west out of Hampton, Iowa, and rail service to rural communities. To be frank, things had become pretty ho-hum in my basement. My M&StL layout depicting Mason City, Iowa, was finished (Great Model Railroads 2015). I passed the time hosting regularly scheduled operations for the local group. That was fine, but the itch to build something – anything! – needed scratching. So I spent several months modeling a large local feed mill complex and associated tracks with no real plan for what to do with it when finished. I was happy building. When…