I could have sworn I'd already started a thread about this layout, but I can't find it, so I'm pretending this is a new thread. Now, of course, to those who follow my modeling blog, this is nothing new. But I suspect there aren't many who follow my blog, let alone regularly, so here's the story for the rest of the world.
This is actually a tribute of sorts to Greg Mahlkov. The plan is adapted from his Apalachicola Northern; I was originally going to clone it, but as I got into the project, I saw the potential for something new. So while this is still a tribute to Greg, it's really a mostly-new layout.
The Penn Central Stockton Branch is a fictional branchline running through a Northeastern New Jersey urban industrial region I called Stockton (no relation to the beautiful town on the Delaware River above Lambertville). The name is a long story in and of itself.
At any rate, the layout was begun back in October 2014, with the intention of making it a "how to" project, which uses Kato Unitrack, so it could have a broader appeal. Most folks 'round here know my life after 2014 sort of fell apart, so the layout sat in storage until January 2017, when I turned it into a "stop gap" layout until I could start my last permanent home layout, the Reading Central.
By April 2017 I had burned out on the project, and put it back in storage until just last month, when I began working on it again. In the interim, the layout went through a substantial change: originally a 60-70-something setting with a few straggling industries to serve, it's moved into the 90s, with a shift toward acute urban industrial decay, where there's basically nothing left but weedy tracks winding through a wasteland of urban industrial blight.
Which brings us to the present: after spending a week breathing new life into the project, I finally have the confidence to share it with the Railwire community.
So, to bring everyone up to speed, here's where it's at: The plan is still the adaptation of Greg's AN, but set in what looks like a post-holocaust urban industrial nightmare. Where I once refused to apply graffiti to any of my rolling stock, I'm now "embracing" it and applying it to virtually everything.
Here's Gregg's plan faithfully adapted for Unitrack:
After several iterations and many revisions, I've now arrived at this:
The callout images represent how I envision the various areas will appear. This is of course just for guidance; the specifics depend on the work I've done up to this point, which will get "decayed" to various degrees. However, there are some overall points: one, all of the sidings are disused. Seriously. And two, only a small percentage of the structures represent anything not yet abandoned (think present-day Detroit).
All of the structures have been started, and are at various degrees of completion. The first one done, save for graf, was Stock Tower (from whence the layout got its name):
Once I'd completed the shell of one of the tenement buildings (just yesterday), I felt compelled to share the layout, because I saw my vision finally coming together.
Since all of the track will be heavily aged and weedy, I was confident the fact that it's Unitrack won't be a liability as far as achieving a level of realism is concerned, based on the reaction to my Trenton Transportation Company--
At the time of this posting, the layout looks like this:
There is considerably more detail on my blog, and those who would like to explore the project can start here:
http://davidksmith.com/modeling/pcsb.htmThose who would like to skip to the chase can start here:
http://davidksmith.com/modeling/pcsb-5.htmI'll post abbreviated updates to this thread so folks can stay abreast of the progress. Thanks for reading.
