Hello all,

For those who are interested. Here is the start of my new plan. It was done in 3rd Planit and was a little difficult to get into a form that you all could see, but the part up top is the important bit. The yard / industrial area is based on the Yard at Mansfield, MA. If you look at Google Maps, and search for Mansfield and look wast of the junction of rt 140 and rt 106, move to the center of town and then follow the N-S line, which is Amtraks NE Corridor, you will see the yard north of the station on the west of the tracks.

Since this is my first blog post here, I figured I should give some background on my desired layout. I started out looking to do a proto-freelanced style layout based on Conrail in the mid-1990s. My research lead me to look at portions of Conrail's Lehigh, Reading, and Harrisburg lines for various track arrangments and design elements. The more I looked into this, the more I began concentrating on the Harrisburg line iteself. One of my desires was to have some Amtrak representation on the line so naturally, this led me towards the western end of the line, starting in Harrisburg.

The Diamond River Valley Railway Co. founded in 1964 as a subsiduary of the Santa Fe Railway Co exists to serve the trackage that was demoted to branch line status after the Santa Fe completed the Holliday Tunnel. The tunnel was built to assist the railroad with navigation through the mountains and to speed up its service between the east coast and the Midwest.

The First Apartment Layout

The First layout started so simple I could have laughed if I saw what it would become.

The original plan started as a 2’x4’ shelf module with three tracks at a base level, two tracks at a higher level, and then two more tracks on a third level.  Naturally, I then decided I wanted to connect the three levels together!!  Thus, I built the benchwork over my bed, a large 4’x7’, and then imagined up a mammoth of plans, by all means.