The TAR Branch has become one of my favorite project layouts from MR. So while reading Tony Koester's Trains of Thought this month on larger scales (by the way Tony, when are you switching to modeling that New England branch in O that's always in the back of your mind?) I started wonderng what would be done differently if the TAR Branch was done in a scale larger than HO. On the one hand it's small enough to still fit in a spare room even in a larger scale. But on the other, it does get a bit wide and would be out of reach in larger scales if we kept to a reasonable access. Just speculating out loud here but would it need to be broken into perhaps several appendeges with walk space between them?
jim
Been out of O since 1970 when I sold the family's legacy Lionel to finance my HO dreams. But I would swap and make the main against the wall/backdrop. Then I would let the warehouse complex that includes Atlas Supply is part of becme a penisula, with a short "aisle" between it and the WSS freight house. That way you could still reach in across the small line of buildings starting with H.G. Wright, etc to work your trains on the main.
Good issue, with a nice selection of subjects, from the WSS to the T&P layouts, with some P. K. Soeberg scratchbuilding showing just how simple it can be and YES! , A RR you Can Model!
Would not be near so compact as the HO version, but could work very well teamed up with staging, maybe even double-ended staging with an around the wall connection if the space can be dedicated to it.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
The deepest part of the layout is the middle, where you have five parallel tracks and two structures stacked up. If more length was available, I'm sure that turnouts could be shifted right or left so that some of these features were no longer parallel, but adjacent. The Atlas Supply Co. and its two spurs could go farther to the left, so the three small industries in the middle could go against the backdrop, for instance. Then the freight house and cold storage could be rotated parallel to the main line, maybe even represented by building flats.
--Steven Otte, Model Railroader senior associate editorsotte@kalmbach.com
My Brother lives in Washington NC, and is near enough to the Tar River / Pamlico Sound. He likes to water ski on the Tar, smoother water fewer boats. I was out on the Tar river in October. This is the railroad bridge across the Pamlico sound.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS