With the advent of a new house in my future, I have the ability to negotiate additional right of way in the new basement.  The basement is long and narrow with an additional crawl space.  The main room is 19' x 51' the stairs are not on a wall. My thought is to make an arround the walls layout around the entire basement and put a 19' peninsula on the far end.  The location is Lake Country in Wisconsin, so this is a proto-lanced subdivision of the Milwaukee Road.  The focus areas will be Hartland, Oconomowoc, and Watertown, WI.

A few more tidbits: scale is HO, and the era is mid 1950s.  The whole layout will be double track as is the prototype in this era.

Based on Sanborn maps, photos from the local historical society, Milwaukee Road track diagrams, and a Milwaukee Road shippers guide, I was able to choose the area to model and design it with a track plan that is fairly close to the prototype.

Here is the first version of Hartland.  Hartland will be the smallest town on the layout industry wise.  All the roads and industries/stations are where they were in the 1950s.  The plan is to put storefronts along the top (backdrop).  This is not how the city is really laid out, but will add visual interest.

To the west is Oconomowoc, and to the east is staging.  Staging will be 8 tracks of through staging (4 each direction) located in the crawl space (at least 20' x 20').  All industries would be worked via a local that is based out of watertown (two cities west), westbound traffic could drop cars that could be switched to industries, but I envision all cars would run to the Watertown yard and would then be made into locals.  Staging represents Milwaukee to the East and St. Paul to the West.

Comments and criticism welcome!

Ryan