New York, Vermont & Northern Rwy. Birth of a layout

[Bernd]

The adventure of starting a layout started in 1997 on six acres out in the country. I had drawn up a plan in Auto Cad of a ranch style house. The wife and I came to an agreement that I would have full rein of the basement and she could decorate the house anyway she wanted to. I had come up with an 1800 sq.ft. design that was then taken to an architect for house plans to submit for a building permit. When he was finished with the plans we wound up with a 2300 sq.ft. house. Quite all right by me.

So next I had to find a spot I wanted the layout to be. I'm standing in the spot where the layout ...ah house will be built.



As you can see the Tonka Toys are there to excavate that all important hole in the ground.
2300 sq.ft. turns out to be quite a big hole.



The walls are poured concrete. The house is T shaped. The garage is toward the top center of the picture. Something I designed into the house is the stairway to the basement, upper left in picture, so it would be easy to bring full 4 X 8 sheets of material into the basement.



The fully enclosed layout area. I'm standing close to the stairway from the garage. The ladder is temporary as a spiral staircase is going there. They take up less space.



And the finished product. It took almost 20 years to get to this point.



I had the house ruffed in, when the windows, roof and gutters where done I took over and did the electrical, plumbing, finish carpentry, heating and outside brickwork. There is still the master bedroom to finish and the kitchen is not fully finished yet. So occasionally I'll be involved with 1:1 scratch building. Just so you know I'm a died in the wool DYI'er unless it's to heavy to do.

So that's it for now. I'll post as soon as I get more pictures together. Hope this will be an enjoyable ride for you.

Bernd

[S&S RR]

It looks like a great start to a layout build.  I will be following along on your journey.

[GPdemayo]

Great  work on the 1:1 build Bernd and congrats on the spacious man cave.....looking forward to your journey.

[Bernd]

Thanks John. You are one of the reasons for joining this forum. It because of your layout builds that I got deeply involved in doing some research in a build that I will document here. But more on that later. Here's what the basement looks like now after 20 or more years. Things have followed me home over those years.

I also had a couple of layout starts and then changed my mind. I was on the dark side of model railroading for a couple of years with interest in On30 due to all the HO stuff I have. That kind of faded out. I was involved with TT scale for several years and tried to help a group of modelers to get it back on the modeling scene. There was to much bickering among the group. Nobody was interested in building kits or scratch building. They all wanted to buy ready made items. TT scale is the Orphan Child of the modeling scales. It's 1/10" = 12" (1:120) That's in between HO and N scale for the newer modelers that haven't heard of it before. I figured I wouldn't get much done if I had an interest so many scales at one time. The decision came last year when I decided to concentrate on just one scale, but include three gauges, standard, 3 foot narrow gauge and 2½ foot narrow gauge.

So before I get into the layout itself a couple of more pics of the basement and then on to modeling.

20 years of accumulation of "stuff I needed".  I'm also very interested in "Home Shop Machining" that's why the heavy equipment.





A shot from the isleway from the basement stairs.



Standing next to the spiral stairway looking toward the future start of the layout.



Facing the hallway to the basement stairs and a distant view through the door of the shop/office space.



Looking toward the machine shop area.





The beginning of the HOn30 layout.





And of course the obligatory pictures of the model shop/office. I'm kind of embarrassed to show these pictures because it looks like I had 10.5 earthquake on the Richter scale. I do get some projects finished occasionally.

On the next installment I'll get more into how I named the railroad and the concept behind the name. I also maintain my own website with my projects. I do try to keep it updated.

Until next time.

Bernd

[Bernd]

Thanks Gregory. Much appreciated.

Hope I don't bore you guys to much with non-model pictures. Not to worry they are coming.

Bernd

[GPdemayo]

Pictures are never boring.....

[PRR Modeler]

Wow, I don't have the skills to build a house. It looks great and you should have a awesome layout.

[Bernd]

Thank you Curt. Anybody can learn those skills.

I put together a little history of how and why I came up with the name NY,V & N Rwy. Hope you enjoy it. Hopefully next time I'll have some pictures to show of the prototype areas I want to portray.

Every railroad needs some form of history behind it. So how did I come up with the name of my freelanced railroad? When I got my first new car in early 1970 I did a lot of fan trips. To understand the name I'm sure you've figured out that the railroad is located in New York. And it is. To be exact it's located in the Rochester, New York area.

So back to my fan trips. There were five large railroads coming into the Rochester area, NYC, Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Erie and the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh. I'm talking back in the steam days. As of today what is left of the major lines is the Norfolk and Southern and the Rochester & Southern. I pretty much railfaned the New England states and down to the Mason Dixon line. I'm very much for Appalachian Mountain scenery. My other interest is in coal mining. So my eventual layout will have a large concept toward coal mining and shipping to customers. The idea of hauling coal from the southern coal states to the New England customers was going to be the theme of the line.

I started to put together some thoughts of what I wanted to model. It's now about 1984, I'm on my second marriage living in a mobile home with no place to build a layout, but one can dream of the day when a basement will be acquired to build that dream layout.
Once I got some ideas down on paper I realized that building a layout to accommodate the length of railroad I wanted. I would need two barns end to end to fit all in. I came to the conclusion that I would only model a portion of the line. I would use the railroads that served Rochester back in the late 30's to perhaps the 50's. That's one nice thing about freelancing, you can fit it into any time line and not have to follow what the prototype did.
The theme for the prototype system was to run from somewhere in the West Virginia coal fields to Portland Maine. Imagine trying to build a layout of that size? I guess I would have needed three barns and two life times. So I whittled it down to just the local area. Now I live approximately five miles from Lehigh Valley's Rochester Junction. The LV had a branch running south going down to Hemlock Lake and a branch running north into Rochester. To the west of me the BR&P, which became the B&O in 39 I believe, ran north to Lake Ontario. They had a yard on the west side of Rochester, near the airport, and ran coal trains to Irondequoit Bay. So I have my coal route to an unloading area. The three railroads that delivered coal to Lake Ontario were the Pennsy, Lehigh Valley and the B&O. The B&O was in Rochester, the Lehigh Valley was at Fair Haven NY and the Pennsy was at Sodus, NY.

Ok so I had my coal theme. Now I needed to connect the coal from the southern states to Lake Ontario. To the west of me is the town of Caledonia, NY. All the railroads, except for the Pennsy, ran through this town. The best part was/is that the B&O crossed the LV in this town and had interchange tracks. So I came up with the idea of using the B&O, which had a major yard in Salamanca NY and then headed south through Pennsylvania, to be the main route of hauling coal. The line would come up using the B&O and then follow the LV to Rochester Jct.  then north on the Rochester branch to Rochester. Only problem here was how was I going to get the coal to the lake. The LV dead ended in the middle of the city on the east side of the Genesee River plus I couldn't use the B&O since it was located on the west side of the city. I needed to get to the lake. Enter the Rochester Rapid Transit. It ran right beside the LV and crossed the river to get to the west side. So the RRT got incorporated into getting coal to the lake. The transit line gave me an excuse to cross the river. I could then come up with my own line going to the B&O at the coal dock.

Now enter the narrow gauge lines of my layout. I discovered the East Broad Top railroad in the early 70's and it became my favorite railroad. Why? You guessed it, coal. So my idea for the 3 foot coal hauler connection will be from a coal mine to a coal processing plant. From the processing plant it'll travel up the B&O version of my line but will in no way be visually connected. It will become a separate scene. During all this planning came an idea to add a quarry line. Again to the west of me close to the town of Leroy NY is a quarry that mines limestone. Interesting part is that the LV had sidings here for ballast loading. The quarry had a narrow gauge line running through the quarry. So I just have to have that also. So thus the New York, Vermont & Northern Rwy. was born, The Route of the Black Diamonds.

Why Vermont? I did extensive rail fanning in Vermont and loved the marble quarries and the mountains. Plus the northern New England states had the type railroads I like to model, D&H, Rutland, Vermont RR, Boston & Maine and Maine Central to name a few. Also having the chance to operate as a guest on the New England, Berkshire and Western layout had an influence. One of my first visits to the layout in the late 70's when they were holding open house had a great influence on my modeling.

So that wraps it up as to the theme of the layout. Being a free lancer gives much latitude to building a model railroad. My though is applying the logic of the real world railroad to build a model railroad that could have been when railroads were spreading throughout the country. One other thing I'm very interested in is animation on a layout. I'm looking at animating the quarry line with loading of cars, taking them to a processing point and loading standard gauge cars. Same goes for the coal mine when I get to that.

So until the next post when I hope to have some prototype pictures of the area's to be modeled.

Bernd

[ACL1504]

Bernd,

Wow, you have one heck of a shop for all things. And, one heck of a layout area.  I think I only know of one house here in Central Fl. with a basement and it is only about 10 X 10.

I did in fact build my layout building in the back yard. I learned the skills as I went. Never laid one cinder block until I did this building. I wanted to learn more roofing skills so I opted to go with conventional framing and not ready made trusses.

I'll follow your thread.

Tom 

I built the layout building on the opposite side of the pool from the house.

[BandOGuy]

We spent 7 years commuting to Rah-cha-cha rrom suburban Bahstan while our daughter studied at UR. Never took much time to explore the railroad scene up there, but your B&O of knowledge the area is good. Looking forward to seeing more of your work and progress.

[nycjeff]

Hello Bernd, you did a great job on the house and I am looking forward to how you do on your layout.    Jeff

[ReadingBob]

I'm following along too.  Beautiful house and wonderful area for the layout.   

[Opa George]

Hi Bernd,

Just jumping in now--and wow, that is one heck of a great way to approach layout design, starting with the house plans.  I would sure love to have  had an outside basement entrance instead of maneuvering 4x8 sheets through the living room and down a small stair.  But at this point, that's all water under the trestle and Ben-Gay on the joints.

This is exciting--can't wait to see it come together into a trackplan.

--Opa George

[Bernd]

Thanks guys. Much appreciated for the kind words.

@Tom, I've been following your build since I found this forum. Had trouble signing on and gave up for a while but still followed your layout build and John Sekirk's layout build. Now that I've committed to documenting the layout I'll have more incentive to work on it to show progress. It's always nice to know someone will give you a kick in the butt if progress stops. I just hope I don't disappoint along the way. And BTW having a very cooperative wife helps in building a house designed for a layout. Also remember many of us up here have basements. I just wish I would have finished the basement before all that "STUFF" followed me home. I did need a wood working area for the finish woodwork.

Looking forward to getting some pics together of my idea for the limestone quarry on the next thread post.

Bernd

[Mark Dalrymple]

It will be interesting to watch your layout plans take shape, Bernd.

Cheers, Mark.