Hello everyone, cancer free since 2016!  Been a model railroader since my Mom and Dad gave me a Marx wind-up O scale tinplate set from Sears for Christmas in 1958.  Took a brief hiatus, thirty years, from the hobby to serve in the Navy and to raise a family.  Currently, I have a rescued 72" church table that I've constructed a giant pizza type layout inspired by Bill Baron's "Model Railroad in a Coffee Table" concept article in the June 1966 issue of MR.  Below is a brief synopsis of my layout: 

LAYOUT AT A GLANCE

 Name:  The Panera Branch of the Oregon Pacific & Santa Fe Railroad

Scale: HO Scale 1/87

Size: 72” circle 28.27 square feet area aka the Giant Pizza

Prototype: Freelance, inspired by the Santa Fe, NWP, and Southern Pacific

Locale: Los Nablus, California in the rural Emerald Valley

Era: Steam – Diesel transition, October 1945 – December 1959  

Style: Island

Mainline run: 17 ¼ feet

Mainline radius: 33”

Minimum turnout: #7

Maximum grade: 2 percent

Benchwork: Tabletop

Height:  42 ½”

Roadbed: Woodland Scenes form strips

Track: Atlas Code 83 flex-track components

Scenery: Extruded foam insulation board with ground cover secured with a diluted white-glue solution

Control:  DCC with SPROG/PC interface and walk around Wi-Fi control

  Welcome to the Panera Branch of the Oregon Pacific & Santa Fe Railway, and my giant pizza layout, an unconventional twist on the continuous loop track plan. A warm spring day in June of 1950 serves as the perpetual setting around the community of Los Nablus, California. There is a passing siding and a spur which allows for some switching to break up the monotony of “just chasing the caboose.”

  There are some truly novel home layouts out there that push the envelope of inimitability with nothing more than a pedestrian sheet of four by eight plywood, some extruded foam insulation glued to the surface, and a boatload of enthusiastic creativity. I must give full credit for my round layout idea to Bill Baron and his “Model Railroad in a Coffee Table” concept showcased in the June 1966 issue of Model Railroader magazine. In developing my layout, I wanted to satisfy three primary requisites. First and foremost, my layout had to be small in size. No more than thirty-two square feet in area. Second, it had to be packed full of scenic detail. Finally, it had to be light enough to be loaded into the back of a pick-up truck or an SUV, transported, then set up for public display.

  Successive layers of two-inch foam insulation were glued to the tabletop to form the basic landforms over a six-foot round wooden church table that I rescued from the Wednesday trash collection. Once dried, I sculpted the foam with a hot knife to achieve the proper contours. A foam rasp along with copious amounts of elbow grease put the final panache on the rolling topography so indicative of the Left Coast. Initially, I wanted to use Central Valley track components but settled on Atlas code 83 flex track and turnouts because of their availability, reliability, and ease of installation. Digital Command Control was a must for my new venture and MRC’s Prodigy Express II system fulfilled all my power and control needs without putting me into the looney bin. Recently, I added a Wi-Fi module that now enables me to operate my little empire via the throttle app on my smartphone. A refurbished laptop rescued from the e-waist bin now allows me to program my DCC equipment on the mainline via a SPROG unit, interfacing through JMRI software with a simple flick of a toggle switch.

  Now some may argue that a six-foot round table is a wee bit overkill for a small home layout, but consider this. Your typical 4 by 8 boasts an area of just thirty-two square feet, while my giant pizza sports a modest 28.27 square feet.  A difference of only 3.72 feet. There is however, an unexpected benefit to my pizza configuration. It affords a whopping 33” (or 24 degree) maximum radius, while your garden variety four-by-eight sheet of plywood can barely support a 22” maximum at best. So, it is now possible for me to operate large-wheel base steam locomotives, like Mikado’s and Pacific’s, as well as full-length passenger cars without any troublesome derailments or ridiculous looking over-hangs!

  The village of Los Nablus is an uproarious homage to Firesign Theater’s 1974 comedy album, “Everything you know is Wrong”, featuring the voices of the late Phil Austin, and Peter Bergman, along with David Ossman, and Philip Proctor. In my alternate universe, a pair of Franciscan missionaries sets out from San Diego in the spring of 1772 tasked with delivering an enormous six-foot Crucifix to the mission outpost of San Francisco de Solano. The pair manages to become hopelessly lost in the Sonoma wilderness and after weeks of wandering aimlessly in circles, the Crucifix was unceremoniously unpacked in frustration and planted at the headwaters of what is now the Panera River. This unofficially established Madonna del Pozzo (Our Lady of the Well) Catholic Mission, eventually the village of Los Nablus, and the northernmost expanses of Spain's territorial claims in North America.

  Once the Chapel was completed in 1774, there was some deliberation on how to explain why the Crucifix was never delivered to San Francisco de Solano. Father Juan Pablo chose to stay on with the fledgling Church while Father Esteban, who murmured incessantly about the unsettling effects the climate had upon his delicate constitution, set out in the spring of 1776 for San Diego. It is said that Father Esteban’s indigenous guides grew weary of his ceaseless prattling’s so they simply abandoned him to the clemency of the wilderness as he was relieving himself behind a giant Redwood one afternoon.  Father Juan Pablo on the other hand, became the patriarch of Los Nablus and an impassioned advocate of the bourgeoning wine and hemp industries that would become synonymous with the Emerald Valley. The 1811 earthquake pretty much leveled the original Church, but if you look carefully at the southwest corner, you can spot remnants of the original structure intermixed with the new Church wall.

  Later in 1897, when the Oregon & Pacific, or the “Opie” as it was affectionately known, pushed north towards Mendocino, a water tower was erected at the spring feeding the Panera River, along with a three-sided shelter. Los Nablus incidentally, is one of those countless sidings along the right-of-way that shares an autonomous, yet symbiotic relationship of sorts with the railroad. Both are uniquely independent entities however they are mutually intertwined in an everlasting quest to survive and persevere. When the Opie went into receivership after the 1901 Panic, Santa Fe President E. P. Ripley wasted no time scarfing up the struggling little railroad. This gave the Santa Fe its long-sought-after access to the arterial wealth of the Napa Valley region plus, the acquisition paid off handsomely when the demand for lumber sky-rocketed after the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

  Over the years, the community of Los Nablus has grown… slowly. In fact, quite slowly. There is now a switching spur servicing a loading dock for McGob’s Fuel & Lumber. A small depot has replaced the original three-sided shelter that now sits next to an enormous open water tank that is routinely utilized for recreational bathing by local children and young adults during the summer. Then there’s Garcia’s with its sprawling stone store, combination gas station, slash post office. Madonna del Pozzo (Our Lady of the Well) Catholic Church is located to the left of Garcia’s, along with the McGob’s modest single-family dwelling. The Tirebiter homestead is perched predominantly on top of the hill next to the highway that connects everything to the outside world.

  A Broadway Limited Imports 4000 class Mikado serves as primary motive-power for the Panera local. It travels out and back tending to businesses and less-than-carload deliveries along the line. To achieve that laid-back west coast familiarity, the mixed is complete with an AHM Rivarossi 85-foot heavyweight baggage rider coach that was reworked into a classic Santa Fe coach-baggage-caboose.
There is still enough passenger traffic to justify the mixed train status with the high school age Garcia sisters and the McGob twins all taking the train daily into Bohica Bay since the Catholic School in Los Nablus only accommodates grades 1 through 8. Depending upon my mood, the local can also be powered by an EMD GP7 or a Fairbanks-Morris H16-44 diesel-electric locomotive. Eventually, an EMC Doodlebug will be relegated to power the Panera mixed as freight and passenger traffic will fall off to a mere trickle when the War of Korean Aggression finally ends in 1953. The naval weapons depot just south of Bohica Bay will eventually be closed in 1959 sealing the fate for all rail service throughout the Emerald Valley. The line will cease operations in 1963 and the tracks will be incrementally removed by 1966. Incidentally, a unique piece of equipment routinely seen on the line are those strange ACF helium gas cars used to service the lighter-than-air dirigibles stationed at Owoeissmee Inlet (Pronounced Oh-woe-is-me).

  There are many noteworthy examples of mixed service that lasted well up to and after April of 1971. Of particular fame was the Wabash – Norfolk & Western’s Columbia branch mixed that was featured in the January 1966 issue of MR that survived until the advent of Amtrak in 1971. Another curious entity was Santa Fe’s very own Wichita to Englewood turn that ran until 1978 because, and I am not making this up here, on the third Wednesday of each month, a pensioner rode the train into Wichita to cash their social security check. My personal favorite is the Georgia Railroad’s “Super Mixed Service” that operated between Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia and somehow managed to sojourned until 1983 because of a tax-exempt clause in their 1832 state charter.

I hope that you have found my pizza variation of this old standard as stimulating and as challenging as I have over these years. This project has given me many hours of gratification and joy which is why we all say, “Model Railroading is Fun!”