I had decided early on that I wanted to model an actual section of the O&W as closely as possible. I wanted to try to capture the feel of the railroad including trestles, bridges, rivers and plenty of scenery. I also wanted as much operating variety as possible. However, the only space that I had to work in was a 12x15' room with a corner missing, and it didn't take long to realize that more than a bit of selective compression (along with a fair amount of Vaseline!) would be needed to fit everything I wanted into that small room. A couple of other factors limited the available space within the room. One was the placement of the main door. This is located in a corner, and worse it's hinged to swing inwards. I looked at re-hanging the door to swing outward, but because of the narrow hall and landing on the other side this was nit practical. I also decided that I did not want a to have to duck-under bench work just to enter the room. Also, there is a small closet at the back corner of the room and a window that I did not want to block. On the left wall (as you walk into the room) are a nice set of built-in bookshelves between the door and the closet. Since I also have a fairly extensive collection of WWI aircraft models as well as various automobile models I decided to keep the shelves in order to have a place to display them. These decisions effectively cut my available space down to about 8 1/2' x 15'.
After realizing that I was not going to fit the entire railroad into this small space I narrowed down my plans to include only the section from Livingston Manor to Roscoe. Livingston Manor was a hot spot on the O&W having been a helper base in the steam era. In the 1950's it still sported a small yard and several industries. Roscoe was the terminus for all passenger trains after 1948 and it featured a creamery, coal yard and wye for turning the trains. I even found space for a famous O&W landmark south of Livingston Manor, the Upper Liberty trestle! I ended up going with a double deck design to give me the length and the features that I was looking for.
The track plan I’ve developed for this layout attempts to strike a balance between prototype fidelity and space constraints. Schematically, the plan follows the actual O&W track maps of the area quite faithfully , although compromises had to be made on station length and so on. Of course, passing track and siding distances are much compressed, but this isn't as big a problem as it might appear since I don't plan on operating trains longer than 25 cars and the O&W's passing sidings seem to be laid out for 100 or more cars. There are a few compromises that I’ve made in the planning that I would have preferred not to, but under the circumstances I am happy with the results.The most obvious compromise I have to live with is restricted aisle width. The "operators pit" in the center is only about 24" wide. Had I gone with an around the walls plan I could have avoided this, but because I didn’t want to re-hang the door or loose access to the shelves or closet I went with the design seen here. I have found that the outer viewing aisle between the shelves and the layout will also work as an operator’s location as well, particularly for operators of the Roscoe passenger trains. The other compromise I decided to deal with was the removable lift-out across the door opening. I had tried to develop a plan that would not require any movable benchwork, but in the end I decided to use this lift-out section to support the tail end of the Roscoe wye. This lift-out goes across the main doorway, but is only used when passenger trains are turned (about once or twice an operating session) so here I decided that the operational gain was worth the slight inconvenience.
Click on the station signs for a photo tour....
