Well, that's simple enough...

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AGE

Jack Ozanichs' Atlantic Great Eastern. 

A few others

Tony Koester's Alleghany Midland

Kevin Burkholder's Great Lakes Eastern (although I'm not sure if he ever got track laid)

Greg McComas' Michigan Interstate St. Clair Sub

Robert Welke's Wisconsin & Upper Michigan

Lyle Beck and Dave Rickaby's Wisconsin & Michigan (2 different layouts modeling the same company)

Mike in CO

Non Prototype Railroads

I would say the V&O number 1 and the AM number 2. Also the Cardinal System Railroads in Ohio.  My Northern Central Railway keeps popping up in my head every so often as a replacement for the PRR/PC on my Buffalo Line. -----  Ken 

Probably,

Dick Elwell’s Hoosic Valley and RPI’s New England,Berkshire and Western.

UTAH BELT

UTAH BELT

then the

V&O/AM/VM trio.

Also the

MR&T, Cat Mountain 

and few others, but those are the big ones for me

The AGE, the Maumee, and the Nashville Road

Jack Ozanich's Atlantic Great Eastern

Bill Darnaby's Maumee Route

Andy Keeney's Nashville Road

My favorite US Model RR's

No specific number one title

Dave Frary and Bob Hayden "Carrabasset & Dead River" .

Paul Scoles "Pelican Bay Railway & Nav. Co".

Dick Elwell "Hoosac Valley RR".

George Selios " FSM".

Joe Fugate "Siskiyou Line"

John Olson " Mescal Lines RR".

Art Fargie / Bar Mills "Wharf Street"

Paul Dolkos "Boston & Maine"

John Callahan "East Berkshire Branch" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzlR-8cVkU&list=WL&index=63

Tom Patterson "CWE"

And some outstanding layouts presented here on MRH. Just to name a few...

Gogebic Iron Range by Hans

RR ? by Rick Sutton

And the many others... 

My favorite EU / UK layouts

The wonderful On30 "Coast Line RR" by Troels Kirk from Danmark

The amazing and 1° Place Layout winner of this year's Hornby Magazine "Yorkshire Dales" by Lewis Bucknell from the UK.

The stunning life long work on the "Hochschwarzwald" by Dieter Bertelsmanns and Jozef Brandl. The reality as it 'was' in H0 scale. Germany. This is not freelance.

A most realistic and fine French layout by Yver Renaud "Luzy". France

A super layout with fantastic vistas by Thomas Bartos from Czecoslavia

Just check these YT video's out and you may be surprised...& inspired...

RR Greetings,

...

To be honest....

John Allen's G&D and Malcolm Furlow's San Juan Central.

V&O...

My favorite would have to be Allen McClelland's V&O.

Bruce Chubb's Sunset Valley has to also be mentioned. 

Randy

My favorite that belongs to

My favorite that belongs to someone else is the V&O.

My favorite is the V&LE, it is in the design stage now. That is Virginian and Lake Erie. The layout will be set in Wheeling, Wva. That is the correct a abbreviation for the state in the time modeled. The line is made up of the following real lines and some short sections to connect them. 
 

Virginian

Ohio River Railroad 

Wheeling Bridge and Terminal Railway 

Wheeling and Lake Erie

Pittsburgh and West Virginia 

Akron Canton and Youngstown 

The layout will be set in Wheeling and also feature the B&O and Pennsylvania Railroads

I’m going with...

The two railroads that got me back into model railroading 25+ years ago:

-The FSM, because looking at an old MR issue from ‘86 showed me what was possible in big city modeling.

-This is just personal, but Malcom Furlow’s project railroad, The Carbondale Central, because it showed what was possible for *me* on a smaller scale. I built two layouts based on the CC.  I still go back and read the project series from time to time.

And, currently, Troels Kirk’s Coast Line RR, since that layout has my current creative juices flowing.

...and one more:  At the original Caboose Hobbies, they had a display 4x8 railroad in shop—I smile that I forget the name of it—but I would inspect every inch of that layout when I would be in the store. And I was in that store a lot!

So, obviously my personal favorites are the ones that have kept me inspired over the years.

Favorite(s)...

Depends on my mood. Also, some of the layouts that I'm going were responsible for specific results in my modeling psyche and some changed my modeling philosophies/approaches. I'm going to try to limit it to the three in this order: The most informative, the most inspirational, the most impressive.

* Most informative:  Allen Mac's first V&O via the RMC series. His V&O Story opened my eyes to just how one could use a proto/free lance effort, yet it could truly reflect modeling a railroad as a transportation system. This layout changed the way I modeled that continues to this day.

* Most inspirational: John Allen's Gorre & Daphetid. John's artistic modeling opened my eyes to the whimsical and artful side of modeling and I gained an entirely new appreciation for such an approach that has remained to this day. IF I had the skills... such an approach could be tempting. Ever since the G&D, I always enjoy seeing well done whimsical (some call it "funky fantastic") modeling.

* Most impressive: Mike Confalone's Allagash RR. Simply amazing to view the scenes he creates. He's taken the V&O concept to an entirely new level of "realism". However, I really need to have a serious talk with him about his era selection. When I see some of Mike's AGR photos... it makes me want to sell off my pathetic attempts at modeling and replace it with a Brio trainset.

Having said all that, I will say that the concepts I've learned from the V&O and other assorted inputs, resulted in giving me the tools I needed to create my own concept that has given me much enjoyment and is very personally satisfying. It's a concept that I created in the mid-1990s, was used on a sizable layout up until a move, and is now being reused on my current layout. I've never tired of the concept, nor have I any desire whatsoever to abandon it or radically modify it. That would be my own Kansas City & Gulf, Ozark Subdivision theme/concept.

Model railroading truly is an amazing hobby... IF you make peace with the geekness of it.

Andre

...

Andre, I've always thought a combination of the G&D with the Allagash would yield something quite simply stupendous...maybe some day

Andre nailed it for me

Yep that pretty much nails it for me, too.

Now there's an intriguing statement. Would this be:

Add Allagash elements to the G&D? Say, redo the G&D using a more prototypical rocky mountain setting and track plan? Like redesign the G&D but with today's layout design best practices -- staging, linear walkaround track plan and maybe a mushroom? Try to recreate as many iconic scenes as possible but remove the spaghetti element.

Add a G&D fanciful flair to the Allagash? For example, do the Allagash 1980s early spring era, but in the rocky mountains. Sort of a freelance D&RGW set in the 1980s early spring but with the G&D name, logo, and general look to the scenes. Make no attempt to duplicate the G&D iconic scenes but aim for a much more prototypical layout and backstory?

Benny, tell us more!

Surprised nobody gave any

Surprised nobody gave any love to Jim Hediger's Ohio Southern.....

...

It's like a tree with a twinned trunk...which trunk do you follow?!

Imagined the fanciful trackwork and depth of field, (yes, even the four tiers of track along one mountain side, or the overhead track in Gorre and Daphetid simply being a second railroad crossing over the G&D but serving the same towns), but with the scenery depth that the Allagash has.  The scenes are short, so you see and feel less of the spaghetti effect, but each scene is like a facet on a highly faceted gemstone, there's lots of them but they overlap in such a way that augments each face.  The hidden spaghetti adds physical run time between spots as the operator moves along the layout...

On the other hand, you could indeed have a more distanced, more prototypically nuanced layout crossing the Rockies, with the same floor to ceiling level of overwhelming scenery where the trains almost seem like they were the observer's last interest when they took "the picture," the "...and a train just happened to be in the picture too..." effect.

It's a fun thought experiment no matter what trunk you follow.  I do believe many of us will be like the old All Thumbs character from the old MR/MRC/NMRA Bulletin cartoons of old trying to pursue such an endeavor.

Ah, upgraded scenery then

Ah, upgraded scenery then.

John's scenery was adequate for the time and it was more the overall combination of the lighting, detailing, composition, and weathering that made it what it was. But technically, the G&D scenery methods were not all that outstanding, especially the vegetation. It seems John used a lot of sawdust grass and weedblossom trees.

If the G&D scenery was redone more like the Allagash as to realism, with things like static grass, ground foam foliage bushes, melting snow, super trees, and spot-on species correct conifers -- yep that would be sight to behold.

...

I hit submit a wee bit soon and had a deeper thought to address this tree...Edited to add the other trunk.

Yes, I do think his scenery was great For The Time, but the scenery skills that our hobbies (Trains, Military, etc) have developed since then plus the burgeoning product support has simply been out of this world.

On top of our skillset expansion, we also have even better access to archives around the world.  Recall those four tiers of railroad passing through one scene?  There's a prototype for that...in the Rockies...where the trains had to make the grade somehow, and they didn't necessarily always use switchbacks if they had the room for balloons at either end of the run.  It looks whimsical right up till you include that prototype picture, and then, well it's not as much of the Faux Pas that we thought it was.

Ohio Southern

You beat me to it, I was going to mention the Ohio Southern. Besides the V&O and the Alleghany Midland Jim's OS really struck a chord with me. I miss that layout, but have some back issues on hand to remember it by. I had heard that Jim was planning a switching layout after he moved but have not heard anything since.

I don't think the original post was asking what your favorite layout was, I thought the question was for the best concept of a fictional line?

Some of these posted are simply layouts that people like.

As for the best concept of a fictional line...

• V&O/AM
• Bob Hegge's Crooked Mountain Lines
• Tyler Whitcomb's Tenino Western (which I've lucky to run in an op session)

There others that I'd think of later, but these are the three that pop up right away...

@P51

If there has ever been a fictional line that absolutely followed prototype operational aspects, it is/was Jack Ozanichs' Atlantic Great Eastern.  Being a former GTW engineer, he pulled no punches when it came to stringent operational authenticity.  I thought I was a pretty good operator 'till I started attending sessions at the AGE on a regular basis.  I realized rather quickly I knew very little in the overall realistic scope of true ops, but I listened and I learned and over time have carried that knowledge with me to other layouts and spread the "gospel" as it were.  I will be forever indebted to Jack - R.I.P. - for his willingness to teach and greatly enhance the enjoyment factor of what operations truly is all about.  Once you got into the flow of how ops really should work, 8 hour sessions as the AGE was synonymous for, were like any other  3 or 4 hour session elsewhere.  Time flew by.  As an infamous AGE "T" Shirt reads..."Once you Know Jack...You'll Never go Back...To the Way You used to Operate...!" 

AGE

An aside: A request for more info.

Would some of you with more information about how the AGE operated that made it so realistic be willing to share your observations via a new thread?

I, for one, would find it very interesting.

Andre