Great Model Railroads

THIS ISSUE OF GREAT MODEL RAILROADS proves that no one modeling scale holds a monopoly on greatness. HO scale, at a proportion of 1:87.1 to the prototype, is the most popular modeling scale, making up a little more than half the layouts out there. So it’s appropriate that articles about HO scale layouts make up a little more than half of the features in this issue – five out of nine. What makes HO so popular? No doubt a lot of it is marketing. More commercial products are available in HO scale than any of the others. But others choose it because it’s not too big, not too small. It’s easier to model realistic details than in smaller scales, and it’s easier to fit the track and structures you want into your…

THERE’S A REASON MODELERS use the term “museum quality” to describe the pinnacle of modeling fidelity. For a first-hand example, take a look at the HO scale layout at the Colorado Model Railroad Museum in Greeley, Colo. Regular readers of Model Railroader will recognize this layout from our December 2008 issue, as well as a number of appearances in Trackside Photos. But since the museum and the layout were new when that article was written, we figured it was about time for a return visit. We weren’t disappointed. Ground was broken in 2002 for what was at the time known as the Greeley Freight Station Museum, and the 10,000-square-foot building was dedicated in February 2004. At the time, the only exhibit was full-size Colorado & Southern caboose No. 10583. While the museum’s…

THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RY. STRATH-CONA DIVISION is an HO scale model railroad set in a fictional location. But the locomotives, rolling stock, and scenery all resemble those of southeastern British Columbia in 1967, Canada’s centennial year. Work on the model railroad began in the late 1980s and is now virtually complete. It includes a mix of large cities, smaller towns, rural scenes, and rugged mountains. Construction began in the Horseshoe Bay area and then progressed to other sections, but the main line was completed before I moved on to a lot of the scenery. Scenery was completed in stages and didn’t always stay focused in one location. If one part became frustrating or boring, then I would switch to another area to continue progress on the major project. The last unfinished area…

FOR MORE THAN FOUR DECADES I’ve been modeling the Buffalo Creek & Gauley RR (BC&G), a standard gauge West Virginia short line, in S scale. I started my first rather primitive representation of the railroad in 1978. An improved version was started in 1986. Work commenced on my third and largest BC&G layout in 1997 and was basically complete when it was dismantled for a move in 2016 (see Great Model Railroads 2011). What you see on these pages is the fourth version of the BC&G, now five years in the making (see Model Railroad Planning 2019). Anyone who has gone through the process of dismantling a large layout in preparation for a move to a smaller residence knows it can be traumatic. We modelers put countless hours into our layouts, and…

WHEN I WAS 9 YEARS OLD, my parents gave my oldest brother a train set for Christmas. I was fascinated, and in an instant began a lifelong love of trains. I begged my father for my own train set, and on my birthday the following year I received one – a Tyco Amtrak passenger train with lighted cars. I was hooked, and every Christmas and birthday after that, I asked for more trains. I set them up on a 3 x 6-foot table, as this was all the space I could get in a house with five children. I would run the trains around and around this simple oval of track, past many Plasticville buildings, for hours. In my early teens, I progressed to modeling an industrial area with some buildings and…

THE N SCALE LAYOUT at the Bay State Model Railroad Museum in Roslindale, Mass. (bsmrm.org), was last featured in the pages of Model Railroader in June 2009. The members of the club that built the museum’s four layouts (in O, HO, HOn3, and N scales) have not been idle in the 13 years since that appearance, making many changes and improvements to the model railroad. I’ve been a member of this club for more than 40 years and focused on N scale through all of it. The advances in this hobby over these years, especially in N scale, are truly amazing. In the previous article we stated that the layout scenery was 95 percent complete. It will likely never be greater than 95 percent, as our layouts are always in a process…