reason I shouldn’t continue with my prototype-freelanced rail-
road. SNE #3 was a small switching layout along two walls in
the basement of a rented townhouse. And, once we started
building a new house I looked forward to SNE #4 – which I felt
would be the ultimate version of the theme.
I’ve covered the “whys” of the SNE in other articles, so I
won’t belabor them here. Suffice to say, one of the things
that appealed to me about the SNE concept was it gave me
a chance to “fix” a few things that I found unappealing with
the southern half of the prototype Central Vermont Railway
(my favorite railroad). Some of the issues I felt needed fixing
included increased passenger traffic (the CV’s southern division
didn’t have much, if any, and I wanted some), interesting sta-
tion buildings, and greater traffic density, since that’s what all
the “experts” told us back then – you have to run lots of trains
in a session lest your operators get bored and never return.
On a practical level, the SNE allowed me to use inexpensive
off-the-shelf plastic steam locomotives to create a workable
fleet for the layout without the need to obtain hard to find and
pricey imported brass CV-specific steam engines (that I couldn’t
afford at the time, even if I could have found them!)
Getting Started
We moved into the house in June 2008, and I found myself
with a wonderful layout room, and a considerable number of
landscaping and other “new house” chores. So I didn’t start
construction until December 2008. The layout’s footprint
looked like Figure 2.
The long peninsula in the center of the room, and the section
of the layout along the wall to the right side of the drawing
were double deck in an effort to get as much mainline run as
Getting Real Column - 3
MRH-Mar 2013
