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My American layout is some what restricted in terms of space. I only have 35 square meters of house and that's on two floors... Therefore a switching layout was the result, even so it had to be constructed in my mother's garage where there is room to put up all 14' by 6' of it. Being portable and exhibitable the layout needed a fiddle yard, which takes the width of the layout from 22" to 6'.

The intention is to show something of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad in its final years and to avoid the rivet counting tendency a decision was made to use a fictional short line for the owning railroad. The lines name comes from the Civil War general as I couldn't make my mind as to what to call my old American layout and had an exhibition coming up and therefore needed a name.

During the last 18 months I have attempted to improve the quality of my modelling as far as specific Pennsy items are concerned. The problem is that I can't really pop out and have a look therefore my discovery of the vast range of good web sites such as Keystone Crossings has helped in improving the accuracy and quality of my models.

The result at present is a layout called Southside Yard.

The layouts exhibition programme details:

This 1960's industrial line set in the Pittsburgh area of the United States is an attempt to capture the spirit and feel of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad in its dying years. This has been done via the medium of a fictional short line called the McClennan Street & Southern. 

The busy South side Yard sees trains from the Pennsylvania the owning McClennan St. & Southern, arriving and departing with goods for the industries in the area. Including a, brewery, cement works, grain silos and a REA depot. There are a number of animals and cowboys to find and an interesting selection of American cars. A selection of McClennan St. & Southern locomotives and permanent way stock can usually be found stabled outside the diesel maintenance shed.

Construction

Southside Yard is constructed from 6mm plywood with a frame of 19*38 timber. This was then covered with cork to deaden track noise. The layout consists of 2 4' and 2 3' by 22" boards and is aligned with brass dowels and held together with case clips. The trains enter and leave from a hidden storage yard constructed in a similar manner to the main boards except that the board top is a traverser and allows easy access to all 4 3'6" storage lines.
Track is a mixture of Peco code 100 and code 75 with the code 100 restricted to the fiddle yard and initial entry to the layout the rest is code 75. Pointwork is controlled by SMP point solenoids from a central control panel on one of the backscenes. This panel is disguised with a 3' long building that is screwed to the layout to ease access if needed. Connection between the boards is with computer 25 way D sockets, and Maplin through wired cables which save work and are fairly cheap!

The layout under construction

Track Plan

Front

Scenery

The track is ballasted with a mixture of Woodland Scenics and magnesium ballast and was then airbrushed with a suitable reddy brown colour, black paint was then used to recreate diesel spills where locos would stand.

Much of the non track area is concreted over and this was achieved by using filler that had been mixed with grey poster paint and then sanded smooth. The concrete was then painted with Crown   emulsion and weathered using diluted paints. The suggestion to use the emulsion came from the NMRA UK magazine a colour called Drawbridge being suggested as ideal. Road markings were added using a yellow artists pencil and Langley drain covers added as needed. 

The remaining open ground was grassed using a mixture of coloured sawdust and ground foam. Brambles etc was then added along with clumps of longer grass.

Buildings

Most of the buildings were salvaged from a previous layout and where necessary refurbished. These are a mixture of scratch built and kits from companies such as Pola. Kibri, Heljan and Smalltown USA. A diner was built using the Model Power kit and added to the layout the remainder of the buildings were constructed from DPM components. All the buildings have been weathered and several now boast billboards from Blair Line.  The backscene was also added and uses Walthers Backscenes and a few pictures of Pittsburgh from the web.

Sundry small details have been added including a crop of animals and couple of cowboys ( Children know where they are and like to see them). Vehicles come from the usual sources i.e.: Busch, Athearn and Walthers.

Stock

Stock lists are not the most exiting thing to read and I haven't included one but I have a few pictures to add and a few comments.

Locomotives

Are mainly Athearn with a mixture from other suppliers. Most have now gained a degree of
detailing including the addition of trainphone antenna to one GP7.

Coaches

The tow coaches in use are Bachmann Spectrum heavyweights and only appear on Steam Specials.

Freight Cars

Again the bulk of the fleet is Athearn, with a fair quantity of MDC. I have tried recently to be more accurate
in my purchasing and as a result have added Bowser cabin cars (Pennsy speak for Caboose) some  with Trainphone and I am in the process of obtaining Red Caboose X29 box cars. The planned CB&T Shops X29D will be added as well if and when it appears.

A long-term project is to replace the doors on the Athearn fleet with something more realistic by removing the "claws" and other overscale items.

A Journey along the Layout

These pictures were taken at the Chelmsford Model Railway Exhibition on the 23rd October 1999

Below are a couple of Pennsy locos taken on the 18th December 1999 and it was COLD in the garage at the time.

Above is class ES15m (GP7) No 8500 and below is class L2s Mikado No 9627 both are Athearn products the GP7 has been super detailed.

The layout was featured in the October 2000 issue of Continental Modeller.