Introduction

In the summer of 2000 we moved into a house with an unfinished basement. Part of the space in that basement was allocated to a home office, part to a laundry and family room, and the remaining room was given over to me as a layout room. The space was 10' 11" by 14' 6". That’s not much space in HO scale, but for one guy, more than enough to keep me busy. As soon as we made an offer on the house I began sketching track plans.

Design

There were certain features that I had to have. The most important was that I had to have as accurate a model of Gordonsville as possible. I also wanted to model the Louisa station as it was the only example of the C&O’s 1892 standard design that I know of on the Piedmont Sub. The Piedmont was a passenger line, so I needed to run passenger equipment. I therefore opted for a 30" minimum radius on the mainline curves. This is a bit tight, but should be ok, and staying at 30" allowed me to incorporate scenic features that I couldn’t have had I used really broad curves. I also settled on Atlas Code 83 track and Caboose Industries ground throws. Those were my givens. Anything else I could fit would be considered icing on the cake.

This is a link to the most recent version of my track plan. As it turns out, I had to use 53" radius curves through the Gordonsville wye in order to get the train sheds to fit properly (and even those may be a bit too tight). That really limited what I could do with the rest of the room. My original thought was that the double-ended siding between Gordonsville and Louisa could masquerade as both the wood yard in Gordonsville and the vermiculite loader in Louisa, but it just isn’t long enough. When I had to go to those broad curves in the wye, it really cut down the length of this siding. I had to go to a Walthers curved turnout just to get the length I did. I’d also considered adding either Bibb or Trevilian against the right-hand wall, but it destroyed the rural character of the line and decreased the separation between the towns to an unacceptable level. I think the current plan gives me fairly accurate representations of Louisa and Gordonsville and a decent mix of freight traffic. Overall I’m pleased with the track plan. If I were to acquire more space (say after the kids move out) I think I’d use it to increase the distance between Louisa and Gordonsville. I’d also try to put the staging tracks in between Louisa and Gordonsville so that trains entered and left the layout from the correct directions.

Other Layout Pages

Layout Construction — photos of the early construction of my layout.

Layout Tour — this is a pretty up-to-date look at my layout as of summer 2010.

You are visitor number

to this site since the new counter was inaugurated on June 28, 2004.
This site was originally established in 1997.

Please note that, due to a huge volume of spam coming in on my email account, I’ve had to change my email address. The new address is lzdaily@nospam.piedmontsub.com (but remove the nospam and the dot before piedmontsub.com).

Copyright © 1997-2011 Larry Z. Daily. All rights reserved.

All materials on this Web site are protected by United States copyright law. This includes, but is not limited to, articles and graphics. Unless otherwise indicated, these materials are the property of Larry Z. Daily and may not be used without prior written permission of Larry Z. Daily

My Guestbook	Site created with	Photos edited with	GIFs created with	Photos edited with	Maps created with

Tooltips created with BoxOver	The author strongly supports	The site counter is a product of