Givens & Druthers II - The Prototype

The Southern Railway's S-Line runs westward from Salisbury, NC, through Asheville to Bull's Gap, TN. Most of my early rail-fanning in North Carolina involved the section of this line between Hickory and Asheville. An article in the January 1981 Model Railroader about the Southern's Asheville Special made me think about including that on the layout. The Asheville Special stopped running in 1975. The locomotives that I was most familiar with on this line, EMD GP38-2s and SD40-2s, were purchased starting in 1972, so I decided on 1974 for the time period of the layout.

Layout Construction I: Shelf Benchwork

The Eastern S-Line layout will be multilevel with three levels of operating railroad and staging above and below the layout, all connected by helices. Like all multilevel layouts, there is a premium on having the decks as thin as possible so there is more room for sceniced, operating layout.

My first thought was to use 3/4 plywood as described in Tony Koester's book Designing and Building Multi-Deck Model Railroads. Thinking about this I realized that even though the layout structure is only 3/4 inch thick, there will still lots of "stuff" hanging down below the layout. This includes switch machines, wiring, signal and power distribution circuits, and lighting for the level below. Depending of the particular equipment used, this will generally be not more than about two inches thick.

If the stuff under the deck that we have to hide is two inches thick, we may as well used that for the layout structure as well. This will save vertical space by having the "stuff" and the structure use the same space. The design that I came up with is shown below, upside down on the workbench.

Bottom of Layout Shelf

Givens & Druthers I: Available Layout Space

The train house is a prefabricated 10x16 storage building in the back yard.

Train House

What am I doing?

This blog is to document the selection, design, construction and operation of my N scale model railroad layout based on the east end of Southern Railway's S-Line between Hickory and Salisbury, North Carolina.