The blue building, once the scene is done will fit nicely into the scene. It's a little difficult to picture it without the other structures around it. The others that are planned have a pretty significant foot print and size as well. If I use that kit again I may try and cut it down shorter to see how it looks, as it it is cut to half of its HO height.
That being said, the layout has sat in its storage trailer since the last show in Bartlett the first weekend of May because of the house hunt. We are packing things in boxes and storing them in the basement so there is no room to set the layout back up...and time has been dedicated to the hunt anyways.
We put an offer in on a house on Monday and we are just waiting to hear back. Its a foreclosure so dealing with a bank where things have to go up the chain and then back down is different then dealing with an owner seller where you get an answer right away. We received a tentative acceptance of bid yesterday, but are still awaiting the written acceptance.
What this means is that the AN will again have a permanent home, and a larger version will again come to fruition. The AN-SIB will still travel to shows and be updated and worked on as I go along, and if we get this house it will actually have its own separate room away from the permanent layout. As I said when I was starting to build the AN-SIB it was never to become part of a new larger layout and I did not want it to be, and that still stands.
I have been planning for the last few months on what I would like to see in this version of the AN. A couple items I have pretty much set in stone so far:
1.
Smaller than the AN in my old house, but still a large layout for long trains -
The basement AN in my old house was 22x40 and not really planned well. It was a great idea in trying to have a complete 22x40 N scale city but in reality it was never an achievable task. Plus the lack of track planning skills and not seeing help from those like DKS lead to several track plan changes on already completed track that it became a nightmare. That AN only had an 8' section of scenery that was "completed" in 5 years.
The layout layout that I have in my head right now is like this:
The orange is the layout area, the black are walls, with the white being unused areas.Trains would enter the layout via a helix on each end from a lower level staging yard. The exact length of the linear sections is unknown at this point, but the max depth of the layout would be 24" and isles would be a min 48". The entire width of the layout would most likely be around 15-17', and I'm thinking the length would be about 30'. These numbers are very rough as obviously the house has not been finalized, so most of the planning at this point is merely locale and scenes.
2.
More rural scenery. -
As the warmer weather is here and we are back up to full staff at work, I have had a lot more time to poke around the locale for the Amoskeag Northern Division (If you don't know the back story of the line check here:
http://www.amoskeagnorthern.com/v3/index.php/about-the-layout). I traded in my chopper a few months ago and purchased a Road King, so now being out for longer trips to the other side of the state are much more comfortable. As I poke around the area where the PRO&C (the prototype like the AN is based on) would have traveled I am finding that I am more and more wanting to model the more rural side of the AN.
Taking those thoughts into consideration I am hammering out whether I want model East or West of the AN-SIB which was set just to the East of Bristol, NH. The PRO&C line was surveyed to follow where NH Rt. 104 West of Bristol and NH Rt. 25 East of Bristol to Portland, ME now are, and also included part of the built former B&M Northern Line. After riding NH Rt.25 on the west side through Rumney and Warren on the former B&M Plymouth-Woodsville line (Abandoned 1954-1955), and then back on US 302 along the former B&M Woodsville-Berlin line (Partially abandoned 1997) I have found several scenes, especially those in Rumney which would look great in a scale scene. I think that pulling some of these scenes down would really fit well.
The surveyed route of the PRO&C would have used the B&M's Northern Line through Danbury, Canaan, and on to White River Jct.
http://www.vermontel.net/~tomh/RAIL/NorthernRR.html <- Very interesting read
The plans for the layout would mostly be through scene running, with a few line side industries here and there for operational interest. The planned major customer would be a paper mill in resemblance to the Cascade mill that was at Cascade Falls in Gorham, NH, served by Berlin Mills Rwy. and owned by Brown Paper, James River Paper, etc.
Operations:I am up in the air if I want this double track or single track. Part of me wants double track playing on the theme that the PRO&C line was a major east-west route, but part of me wants single track with long passing sidings to add interest. I am also up in the air as to if I want to add a slight grade, so as to make a helper district. The valleys that these lines ran through and that the PRO&C was planned were wide and gradual, but pose some steep grades in some areas.
