odel railroads can be as stunningly simple or as amazingly complex as the fertile minds of their creators. In a way they really are like moving snapshots of prototype railraods, and some of them have as many views and as much scenery as the real world they attempt to portray.

The Richmond, Frederickburg, and Potomac - Western Division

Having finally negotiated the rights to lay some track from the local zoning commision (I just call her the wife), I have begin designing the initial phase of a model railroad that can grow into something larger as the years roll by. Because I am, at heart, an south eastern boy, I am concentrating on a railroad that operates fairly exclusively in my home state of Virginia, the RF&P. I decided to model a fictional western subdivision, so I could have some leeway in what I do, but the operations will be much the same as the real RF&P in terms of interchanges with other railroads, types of cars carried, and other aspects of the railroad.

As I progress, I will add updates to this page to show what I've done, and where I'm going.

The Concept
Requirements

As my current space is limited, I elected to do a shelf style layout which would embody one of the yards I plan to incorporate in the larger layout. After some very helpful advice from the folks over at the trains.com forums (and a few scratched attempts at a track plan), I finally came up with the following requirements:

1. Staging. I wanted at least two staging tracks so I could actually operate the layout.
2. Narrow Shelves. Since this shelf was going to be mounted nearrly 5 feet off the ground, I needed to make sure I could reach the back of the layout easily.
3. Industrial Switching. This goes hand in hand with requirement number 1, above. Once I had the freight cars into the yard, I wanted to be able to do something with them.
4. Functional. And this was probably the hardest concept of all to settle on, but it takes a great deal of planning to make a yard really functional so you aren't constantly blocking one train with another.

Space and Time

Now that I had a concept of what the railroad should be, I needed to place it in space and time. I elected to model a yard set in the city of Roanoke, Virginia, which would allow interchanges with several railraods, including the N&W, as well allow me to provide some local flavor to the industries. I placed the railroad deliberately in the year 1963, as I really wanted to model deisel operations after the end of the steam era, but before the mergermania that followed which spelled the end of many of the eastern railroads, at least as separate entities.

With the concept firmly fixed in my mind, it was time to move on to actually designing the railroad.

Additional Pages

The Trackplan
Construction (with photos) - not yet available
Rolling Stock - not yet available