ing a vast amount of N-scale track clean did not appeal to me. I’ve never had much personal interest in HO (believe it or not), mainly be- cause so many great layouts have already been built in that scale. I was and still am a fan of PRR big
I had a real interest in proto- typical operation, and I designed the layout with this in mind. As far as I knew, such a layout did not exist in 3-rail. It would be an interesting challenge to see if it could be done.
main layout room, stacked with 18 inches between the yards. The yards originally contained eight tracks each, but staging has re- cently been expanded by adding six tracks to each yard. The main layout room is 28x52 feet, while
steam, particularly the 10-driver locomotives. I knew I would need a minimum radius of something like 60 inches to run these loco- motives in 2-rail O scale. There were some scale brass PRR loco- motives coming out then. Sam- hongsa-built models of at least nine classes of switchers, freight and passenger locomotives had been imported within the previ- ous 10 years. The 3rd Rail divi- sion of Sunset Models had just re- leased the I1s 2-10-0. All of these 3-rail locomotives would run on 36-inch radius curves or smaller and were produced in sufficient quantity that I could find them on the secondary market when ready to buy.
Layout Design
Rather than choosing a specific area of the PRR to model more or less faithfully, I decided to design a railroad that would be fun to op- erate while making it look like the PRR. As a concession to O-scale’s size, I placed my yard along the longest basement wall, with a town on each of two other walls and a peninsula jutting out from the last wall. I designed towns on both the upper and lower levels of this peninsula. I wanted to have a long main line with plenty of dis- tance between towns, so the track plan became a room-sized three- turn helix. I placed staging yards in a separate room adjacent to the
the staging room and my work- shop share the 18x20 space un- der the house’s family room. The lower staging yard repre- sents Harrisburg, Enola Yard, the Petersburg Branch, and points east; the upper yard represents Pittsburgh, Conway Yard, Shire Oaks Yard, and points west. When viewing the layout, westbound trains move from right to left, so it is like looking at a map. Two additional staging yards are locat- ed under the scenery and repre- sent points to the south: Bedford, Pennsylvania, and Cumberland, Maryland. Each of these yards contains three staging tracks. The room-sized helix design resulted in a long main line run
Industry A B6sb 0-6-0 with loaded boxcars of furniture from Pennsylvania House returns to Annville Yard while the delivery truck is loaded at J. Smith Coal & Supply. The coal facility was scratchbuilt except for the fences. The delivery truck is a Berkshire Valley body on a Matchbox Budweiser truck chassis.
JULY 2015 57
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