When the obvious answer is right in front of your modeling nose.  Duh.

Yes, there's the answer. 

I think it was that I was so damned close to retirement, and with the slippery slide that my employer had been on over the past several years as far as knowing or caring about how to run a railroad, my thoughts returned me to a much simpler time.  Simpler in terms of getting things done by having the tools needed for the job, and having a group of people around that knew what the hell they were doing!  Getting hired right "off the street" as a train dispatcher with WP was NOT simple, and more than once I was ready to give up and stay in radio. But I was still young and full of piss and vinegar in 1979, and I kept at it.  It worked.  There it was....my very first railroad employer, Western Pacific! The WP had circled around after decades of my other dalliances in model railroading, and headed me right back where I really should have been all along.

But how to model the WP?  Of course I had been kitbashing WP stuff in HO scale since the late 1960's / early 1970's and featured at least WP run-thru power on my first really big layout in high school, that being the joint BN-SP Line between Klamath Falls and Chemult OR.  I still had some of the leftovers, a bit rough by today's standards of course. But the fever had been reignited. Within a feew weeks, I really got back into the Father River Route feeling, acquiring an A-B-B set of Athearn Genesis F's, and the needed Broadway Limited California Zephyr cars to make up a twelve car train. I wanted to grab them now, when they were plentiful and priced low. But what could I do in my envisioned future space in our retirement house (still undetermined in terms of location and size) and what would it be?

I guess I "wanted it all."  The colorful pooled power from the BN (and all its component companies at the 1970 merger time), UP, and of course, plenty of orange and silver WP power, and maybe an early McLeod Green unit or two.  Oh, the canyon would be great, and of course, EVERY Western Pacific modeler dreams of Keddie.  In practical terms, perhaps concentrating on Keddie yard as the featured spot on the layout, along with the "Wye," and staging tracks leading off to the west, north and east. 

Hmm.  No matter how selectively compressed, Keddie would take space, not to mention being able to work the Wye in.  Creating staging (obviously shared staging for all three directions was the answer to conserve track needed) would be a nightmare.  Maybe I could hope for a slightly larger room than a spare bedroom dimensioned space. Maybe a basement?  Not likely, since we'd be wanting to leave the part of the country where basements were practical and prevalent for our retirement.  And besides, I had just spent well over a decade working on a mid-sized layout, double decked and helixed, and had a sour taste in my mouth from the process and lack of progress on such a "monster."

So, I thought, "How about someplace in the Sacramento Valley?"  No Keddie Wye, but perhaps a more usable and practical town could be modeled in a smaller area, just like the SP's Santa Barbara Sub Div had been envisioned.  Wide curves, staging below and just enough scenery change to make it flow into a decent sized mainline run.  Hmm.  To me, the WP in the Valley meant the Wobbly and one of their subsidiary lines, the Sacramento Northern or Tidewater Southern.  Maybe I could work out an "interchange" scenario in this space, with Marysville as an example.  Not to be modeled directly, but use the design elements of that place. 

Drawings followed, and then more precise Word.Doc designs.  I came up with some rather inventive designs, but they all had one thing in common....staging tracks that would be under the main layout, and with limited square footage and minimal mainline run distance in order to change elevation for access to such staging without making it look like a mountain railroad.  Yep, that WAS possible in say, a 10x12 room. But that damned staging level so tightly tucked (4 inches or so under the top level) under the main portion.  No matter how good the standards and tolerances I would throw into building those subterranean tracks, I could see nothing but problems.  I would NOT be getting younger, and the thought of having to do much in that "height-challenged" space wasn't too terribly appealing. 

I thought briefing of visible staging down the center line of the room, but then the mainline run around the four sides of the room would be shortened to nearly nothing more than the town, a few yard tracks, and run-off on both ends to staging.  Maybe a double ended staging design with two walls (one long, one short) devoted to two separate "locales."  Short trains would be fine, but what about that CZ, and pig and autorack and hycube box car trains?  The engines would be heading into the "hidden" entrances to staging when the rear of the train was just coming into view from the "hidden" staging.  I tried all sorts of ideas, but the ability to place that staging someone really shut possibilities down.

Another factor-  geez, I'd be starting this layout in my early 60's, and I wanted to be able to have it "finished to a certain extent" that it was an operational and scenic delight.  I looked at my options with modeling a mainline portion of the WP (and maybe either the SN or TS), counted up the track required, and engineering and said, "WHOA, we've been down this road before."  I did not want to squander my retirement years muddling along with something that would never rise to any sort of advanced level of appearance.  Let's face it, my wife and I would have plenty of other things to occupy our time in retirement, I didn't envision me settling down to a locale where a "round-robin" group of model rails could by once a week and help me out, and any effort, even the smallest effort as put forth in my designs for such a layout, would likely end up "just taking floor space." 

Well, by 2012, I KNEW that the WP (and maybe the SN or TS) would be the focal point of the layout.  And so the great purge began of all that Midwest equipment.  I sold off and shipped over 900 pounds of railroad books, and parcels of model stuff (rolling stock, engines, detail parts and decals, scenery and buildings) to over 600 different folks via EBay.

Now what?

By 2011, I had removed all the old layout. 

And I was thinking about trying the Iain Rice method of "shadowbox" model railroading. So I constructed an small L-shaped test module(s) using his methods for construction as outlined in his book about Shelf Layouts.  And I liked it. 

I did change things up a bit... added a box frame of 1x3's in which the foam sat. It was all very solid.  I was using the 1/4" heavy steel L angle shapes left over from the previous layout instead of the two prong bracket / wall mounted support strips as he outlined.  I basically wanted to see how the thing looked with the fascia and overhead lighting set up and fascia.

It was very very satisfying.  I went ahead and put up a small amount of track (prefab) over that Homabed stuff, and was pleased with the results.  I had hoped to get around to do some hand-laid track on the bench work to test the strength, but never got to that. I had also wanted to experiment with some of the many newer methods of scenery.  Never got to that.

Basically, I had covered everything I wanted to experiment with on this type of layout construction.  Use of two-inch foam, couple of types of roadbed (cork and Homabed), laying down pre-fab track including super elevation, and wiring up and playing with that Digitrax system.  Even adding decoders to a couple of units.

At this point in time, I was still looking ahead to a layout in a spare room location in a future retirement house, like about 11x13 feet. 

Shelf style with perhaps a two foot wide peninsula down the long way middle.  SP Coast line with the best features of the Seacliff / Oceano section based in about 1967.  Those hard mud cliffs, oil pipeline land bases and of course walking horse wells here and there, a beach, a couple of those great SP Coast Line steel bridges over arroyos, leftover of old Highway 101 and the businesses of that era, and a small town with plenty of industry and a base for a yard engine and local, with thru trains picking up and setting out blocks of cars. So, visible main line would be about 80 to 90 feet, and staging below, which would make it a "continuous run" design, i.e. double ended staging to serve either direction, or to store passenger trains.  Oh, I was drooling about modeling the Lark, Coast Daylight and "Sad Sam" mail train.  had a few pretty detailed layout designs produced, and was pretty well satisfied with the concept. Minimum 30 inch radius for those passenger trains and piggyback.

And, being the pre-planner person that I can be at times, I started buying all sorts of SP stuff to get ready for the modeling.  Engines, cars, passenger equipment, etc.  More and more boxes of stuff.  Right there along all the Midwest prototype stuff left over from my Milwaukee Road designs of the previous 20 years. It was starting to overflow to the garage and even one side of the laundry room for storage.  God only knew what all I had in there!  I sure as hell didn't. 

Yes, I was getting ready for retirement.  I think I even had blog on this site that started talking about the layout and including a track plan or two and design "points." By now, it was getting close to 2012, and I had dreams of getting lots of that SP stuff kitbashed, or painted and decaled and detailed in advance of retirement (planned for 1-1-14) and relocation.  But of course, following all that pre-planning (and expenditures on rolling stock), there was no follow thru.  Just not enough time, or poor time management.  Did so much on-line research for the time period and equipment.  But didn't get to the models. Maybe I just wasn't ready for it.

And then, I realized what my true calling in model railroading had been all along, and what I wanted in the future.  It was so obvious.

(to be continued...)