While my STRATTON AND GILLETTE is supposed to be a successful Class A line with thousands of miles of track, my layout represents a very small portion (less than 0.05%) of the railroad.
I don't know why so many freelancers feel like they need to model the whole system, while BNSF modellers are happy modeling one intermodal yard and an interchange track.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
My layout represents nearly 400 miles of real railroad. It's a little bit compressed here and there.
Mark P.
Website: http://www.thecbandqinwyoming.comVideos: https://www.youtube.com/user/mabrunton
I have a small layout with twice-around design,10’x14’. I had never given it a thought of total distance. The mainline has 120’ of track which is mostly mountains. The community is small so maybe 30 to 50 miles to the next city. I can go into a tunnel and stop on a siding or seriously slow down a train before it emerges from the other tunnel to simulate distance.My norm is to park a freight on the hidden siding then park a passenger next to it and go with the freight. Every other train emerging from the hidden track is freight. A passenger enters the tunnel and a freight comes out. Mel My Model Railroad http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/ Bakersfield, California I'm beginning to realize that aging is not for wi
I gave up on trying to represent reallistic distances after my Dream House layout. That layout was in N scale and had a mainline run of more than 100 feet. It still did not feel like it had a real sense of traveling a distance.
There were three cities on the layout with about 40 feet of trackage between each one.
Since then, I have just had scenic blocks at least the length of a train between cities. The train disappears and comes back in another city. This approach has been satisfactory for my desires.
My next layout will only have two cities with a loop in another room where the train leaves and returns to simulate distance.
I model (HO) my old home town and the Chicago & North Western line that ran through it north and south. That's four miles approximately. So the amount of compression is quite modest by most standards since I have well over sixty linear feet of pure main line, with staging yards at either end. Of course it took only a few minutes for a mainline train - particularly the passenger trains -- to leave and enter the city limits so in that sense mainline trains are kind of a token gesture on the layout, basically there to give the local switcher, the real star of the show, something to worry about.
What is funny however is that because of the inevitable curves, and the fact that the industries along the tracks at those places were not themselves curved (as some warehouses are by the way), that means that in some areas I have had to practice selective expansion rather than selective compression, and some distances between industries are actually longer on the layout than in reality as a result. The consequence is that other layout design elements are pushed closer together than I would have liked given the 1:4 compression ratio of scale miles to prototype miles that I have. The purist in me is bothered but those are the givens I have to deal with.
Dave Nelson
Hello all,
I hope everyone is pulling through this difficult year.
I tried doing a search, but had no luck. How many miles of track goes your layout represent? I've always liked the idea of modeling a small geographical distance, even though I have ample space available.
Ed
Semi newbie HO scale modeler coming from the O scale world