Eagle Street in O

 What I am going to write about maybe old news to some, if I'm going over old ground I apologise. It's new to me. It may be new to some of you.  As I mentioned in the previous post I have no feel for the size of an O scale building. So I feel that one of the first tasks on this project should be to make some buildings. After Christmas there might be some O gauge houses on sale in Menards (A US DIY chain that in its toy section sells an ever increasing line of items for Lionel three rail O gauge and H0 scale model railways) Or perhaps I could find some cheap building kits on sale on the web somewhere just so I can get a feel for door and window sizes and building mass. Mostly, I want to build these structures myself because if you take a "drive" down Eagle Street courtesy of Google street view you'll see some rather nice architecture, buildings that would really set the location. This sign shop is pretty much a must. Bright and colourful, it would stand out. I also...

So to the planning. On first inspection it really seems it should be quite simple. There’s just a single line leaving the exchange yard and a straight track running through the streets to a short passing loop at the ends of the line in the water board property. Where the line goes after that is another story. One that is just as interesting. The extent of the line. Pretty straight as you can see  Simple requirements for the layout result in a simple track plan. Before settling on such a simple plan I read Mike Cougill's book about his layout  Mill Road  available from OST publications . I found Mike's writings invaluable in getting my thoughts straight. Experience has taught me the value of simplicity in a layout, and I have derived a great deal of pleasure from operating a simple tuning fork layout. The prongs of the fork are short, probably only long enough for a 50' car, the stem is long so that I can watch the trains run through the street. As I was putting up our Dep...

 There was another of my blogs somewhere that was about building an O scale, maybe even P:48 layout based on aspects of the railroad that served Plymouth Industrial Park in Plymouth MN. Forget about it. (Not entirely of course, there's every possibility that I'll come back to it in the future. It's an interesting location) But... I discovered something far more interesting to me. With street running, short trains pulled by tiny locomotives, and a major city utilities facility. Eagle Street on the New Orleans Water and Sewerage Board Railroad. Yes, as unlikely as this sounds this is a real thing. A railroad that goes to a water and sewerage plant. It runs right up the middle of a road for three quarters of a mile. How cool is that? Eagle Street, Looking North the rails in the middle of the road I have been doing quite a bit of research on the line to date. I'll share it here as the project progresses and in the Spring Issue of the Micro Model Railway Dispatch  as well. T...