So the first part of my plan is to build a fiddle yard and my first town and yard, so that I can begin operation no matter if the entire layout gets finished or not. The other thing is to create a series of small scenes so as to give the idea of traveling some distance through the country side. Considering that I will have a point to point with over sixty feet of mainline, I intend right now no more that two towns,one village and a couple of in between flag stop shelters. I only plan to run one train at a time,thought set up the wiring to allow two trains to run,if someone should show up that wants to run one. So scenery is going to be a major feature,though low rolling hills as much of the state of Maine is. Looks like I am going to have to make a lot of pine trees,using the bottle bush method with flocking.I start with fifty to make and go from there. My biggest yard is a three track yard and my longest train is six cars long, small forney locomotives and only two of them. So despite the amount of room a simple basic railroad, again I was fascinated by the smaller of the Welsh narrow gauge that I visited back in 1968. There is a beauty with simplicity and slow speeds, and a relaxed schedule.I have four of the 1904 Cruved Dash Oldsmobiles, both for comic relief and an early hint of what is to come. Not that they look the least bit dangerous to the little railway of the time. I may put some of them into the troubles of early auto travel.

Now I notice that a lot of the ON30 seem to like caricature a bit in their railroads. I see that a lot in HOn30 just like the 6 inch radius. I am less obvious and will use 24 inch radius.But then even so that is tight when you consider how much room that I have to play with.Not too many people have a 24 foot by 24 foot room to play with.

Yet it is basically a shelf railroad, with shelves only 30 inches wide,so my attention will be on what is by the tracks mostly, including all the buildings will be revenue producing builds. The rest of the towns won’t even be shown, we will assume they exist out in that large aisle way. Sort of like a movie set, but it also means I can use larger better quality buildings,something that 2 or 3 freight cars will not look silly in front of. But imagine having a bit over 18 feet square of aisle.No danger of tight fit for anyone that should visit. Plus I do have some other uses for the room planned,meditation,drumming as well.

Started with big and transcontinental railroads an worked my way down to tiny little out of the way railroads.

Despite all the promise that narrow gauge being cheaper to build, most of that was from sub standard engineering practices, such as wooden trestles instead of fill, steep grades and tight curves, mostly to avoid deep cuts, long fills and tunnels. So using untreated wood, and little ballast often little more than dirt, maintenance costs were soon very high. So most narrow gauge was granted higher than normal freight and passenger charges to get by. If, anything our model railroads,especially narrow gauge ones are usually built to far higher standards that the real thing. The real ones tended to follow that landform wandering up and down ever few feet. Dirt rather than gravel often meant rotting ties the first year, rickety bridges and bad track meant that many of them had trouble even making 6 to 8 miles and hour and still might go off the track several times between towns Still re-railing them was rarely a lot of trouble and slow speeds meant most wreckage was rather limited,unless it was one of those western mountains ones with steep canyons and then it could get scary.

We actually had a few mining railroads that to get to the towns in time, built right down in the desert gullies. Of course when they did get rain several miles of track would get washed away, and it could take days to weeks get the railroad running again.

I am not sure we would want to create derailments,but it might be fun to see how rough we could make our rail lines look perhaps creating a bit more of a gentle roller coaster look. Then you have strange people like me who compromise, I love lots of curves, but I plan on no grades more than two percent,and I am thinking of stone bridges, so as to end bridge maintenance and more fills,perhaps burying to original trestles. But then I am influenced by righting the narrow gauge in Wales. So I may have a bit of the gentle roller coaster look, but I will excuse my easier grades and stone work by having a Scotsman build it who was thinking a bit longer term than most narrow gauge promoters, because he intended to run it as its president. Yes R. Cornelius McGregor was a stubborn man and the Clifford Railway shows him being a stickler on well maintained road beds and good engine maintenance.

By the way I commented on that poor mistreated critter that you have on your railroad.[Grin]

I was ready about a guy that owns a 1876 wood burning locomotive that he hauls around to various narrow gauge railroads to run.The fastest he had ever run it was 30 MPH and that scared him.So with most of the actual road roads,and poor track maintenance it was more like that 12 to 20 MPH would be about as fast as they ever ran Now as I am only going to have DC, I hope that I can run that slow. What I would like is average of 15 MPH for freights and perhaps up to 20 MPH per passengers. So we will see what actually happens.

Future Railway Preservationist Committee. [Grin]