Tabla de contenidos para MRP Annual 2026 en Model Railroader

I recently read in Aviation Week & Space Technology that 55% of world’s population lives in urban areas. Further, the United Nations says that will increase to 68% by 2050. That suggests that the trend we see toward more spare-room and apartment-size layouts will continue to develop. Rest assured that we will continue to welcome article candidates on more compact railroad designs. This issue covers five railroads designed for a small room or along one wall of a garage. They cover most of the scale and gauge bases: N, HO, S, and On30. I was especially pleased to receive Joseph Kreiss’s report on his On30 Louisiana swamp logging railroad, as he has built a lot of very interesting railroad in a small room — and has an HO rail-road stacked…

Home downsizing after retirement doesn’t always mean downsizing the basement. In fact, our downsizing from a large two-story to a smaller one-story ranch resulted in a 60% increase in basement space. In July 2021, we moved into our new home with 2,200 square feet of unfinished basement. With my love of long trains and high scenery-to-track ratios, I never really considered HO scale during my 50 years of modeling in N. With so much space now available, I not only considered it, I decided to make the switch to HO. Then I figured I might as well go even further and changed from Midwest railroading to mountain railroading. Of course, my love of the modern Union Pacific eliminated any possible change in railroad or era. With many Union Pacific mountain…

When I first started designing layouts back in the 1990s, I had thoughts of the dream layout I would someday build. It was never drawn on paper, but it occupied my mind for a long time, and that monster inside me kept growing and growing and growing and consumed my daily thoughts more and more. In my mind, I could see it all: a huge beast that filled every inch of a large basement, and of course one deck wasn’t enough. The main line would snake from near the floor almost to the ceiling, because we all knew that bigger was so much better back then. And it didn’t matter that I was living in a small, one-bedroom apartment at the time. Someday that model railroad was going to happen,…

Like many of you, my interest in trains started at a young age influenced by an O scale layout my father built in my grandparents’ basement. I often visited my grandmother in Rhode Island, and during one of our visits, my mother planned a family outing on the Edaville RR in South Carver, Mass. I was around 5 years old and vividly remember being fascinated by the sounds and smells of the steam locomotive, which influenced my interest in modeling steam railroading. My family took regular skiing vacations to Vermont for more than 25 years, and we would pass through the town of Rutland, which engraved the city name into my thoughts. On the way to one of those many skiing vacations, I remember spotting the bright red diesels of…

We love progress reports! The area of my Gateway Western visible in the lead shot from my MRP 2025 article is starting to develop! Matthew Freix Manhattan, Ill. MRP 2025 I really enjoyed John Golden’s article in MRP 2025 on a traverse table-based layout. If he builds another one, he should write a step-by-step article on building a traverse table for Model Railroader. Until I read his article, I had not appreciated the importance of it on a small layout. Jeff Halloin Eau Claire, Wis. I certainly enjoyed Tim Nicholson’s “Small spaces, high standards” feature in MRP 2025. Both his modeling and his photographs set a very high bar, indeed! Who would have thought you could fill 10 pages with great photos of a layout as small as Tim’s? Brooks Stover…

If you turn to the cover of this annual, you’ll notice its name emblazoned there: Model Railroad Planning. It doesn’t say Model Railroad Design. The distinction between planning and design is a crucial one. Understanding that will play a major role in determining the success of your layout — success being defined as being a railroad that actually gets built and delivers the level of satisfaction and enjoyment you envisioned going in. Planning refers to overarching strategic decisions and needs to be done first if any degree of success is to be ensured. Design is more tactical in nature and addresses things such as technical specifications. Modelers often get into trouble by jumping immediately to the tactical decisions and missing the big picture. They design the wrong layout, one that…

It’s March 1978. Americans are Star Wars wacky and disco drunk, and a flamboy-ant rock band called Van Halen has just released its debut album. But here in the Appalachian hollers of southwestern Virginia, life is much less frenzied and more traditional. Take, for instance, the Southern Ry.’s Slate Fork Branch, a former short line that a steel consortium founded in the early 1920s. Carloads of bituminous coal move over its rails much as they have for the past half century. Located close to the Kentucky border, like its coal-hauling neighbor Interstate RR, the old Slate Fork Ry. interchanged a steady, if not large, volume of coal and miscellaneous freight with the Southern and the Louisville & Nashville RR. Another interchange partner, the 4-mile-long Cumberland & Appalachia, a former logging…

John Wallace was a teenager in the late 1940s and took many pictures of the New Haven Railroad’s Connecticut Valley Line, which passed by his childhood home. He later gathered his photos and reminisces of the line for an article for the New Haven Railroad Historical & Technical Association’s (NHRHTA) Shoreliner magazine. After moving to our new home in 2007, I discovered the article as I was planning my layout. Among the stories he shared was a detailed description of a typical “day in the life” of the local wayfreight. When I had the chance to meet John in person, I decided to try to bring his memories to life in HO scale. The Valley Line during the late 1940s was one of a vast network of branch lines that…

The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area (often called the DMV for District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) receives scant attention in the model railroad hobby. As a longtime resident of that area, I find that perplexing, as the region is chock-full of interesting and diverse railroad operations. As far back as the Civil War, the rail-roads of the DMV were both vital to the war effort and extremely busy. In the later steam era, the growing city relied on seven different railroads to serve it. Potomac Yard, which was the main rail-road yard in this area located in Alexandria, Va., hosted trains from the Pennsylvania RR; Baltimore & Ohio; Chesapeake & Ohio; Seaboard Air Line; Atlantic Coast Line; Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac; and the Washington & Old Dominion railroads. The PRR…

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When model railroaders think of the Illinois Terminal of the 1940s and ’50s, images of a traction line with spindly track and interurban passenger trains running through the fields, towns, and small cities of central Illinois probably come to mind. The Illinois Terminal Co. (ITC) was one of the largest interurban railroads in the country. Its electrified system spread across Illinois from Peoria to Bloomington, Decatur to Danville, and Springfield to metro St. Louis. What many modelers may not know is that the ITC had an extensive steam-and later diesel-operated system around the Illinois Metro-East area across from St. Louis. The ITC served St. Louis, crossing the Mississippi River on its own McKinley Bridge. On the Illinois side, it spread across the area to Madison, Granite City, Wood River, and…

Although I didn’t sit down at the drawing table and specifically plan it this way, I have set myself up for plenty of model railroading fun as I age. I managed to squeeze not one but two small layouts into a typical 10 x 12-foot spare bedroom of our new home. Both railroads incorporate remnants of past layouts, reimagined to fill the new smaller room after a recent move. The shelf layouts were rebuilt to be stacked. I decided to place the On30 Mosquito Creek Lumber Co., a narrow gauge Louisiana-swamp logging rail-road, on the lower deck, and my contemporary HO scale Hawaiian railroad, the Big Island Rail/Kawaihae Harbor RR, on the upper deck. As I reflect on this choice, I’m beginning to see the benefits of this decision. As…

My wife and I moved south from congested northern Virginia to quieter Williamsburg, Va., in 2023. Once in our new home, my goal was to build a layout I could maintain and operate years into the future. Model railroading has been an enjoyable and important part of my life for more than 50 years, and I wanted that to continue. But while healthy and fit for my age of 75, I understood that time wasn’t on my side, and I needed to consider that in my plans. The northern Virginia version my HO scale proto-freelance Oregon Coast RR (OCRR) kept me busy and entertained for more than 18 years, growing to fill a 35 x 55-foot basement. During that time, I hosted more than a hundred operating sessions with crews…

I have been an N scale modeler since 1968 and have built seven layouts that reached a reasonable level of completion, along with some Ntrak modules. Three-deck layout No. 6, measuring 12 x 40 feet, is in our New Hampshire summer home. It was started in 1997 and is now in its third home with only minor changes. The layout is set in 1976, as I love the Santa Fe’s Bicentennial SD45-2 diesels (I have all 5!), and most of my cars are older 40-footers that fit that era. When I retired, I spent a lot of time getting No. 6 out of storage and back together. When my wife retired, we began renting a house in The Villages in Florida for the winter. Once we knew we liked it…

The photo shows a forced perspective using three different scales. I model in the unusual scale of 1:72 — see MRP 2018. But that doesn’t mean that everything on my railroad adheres to that proportion. Using figures and models of a slightly larger or smaller scale can “force” the perspective to create what appears to be greater depth in a scene. The two vehicles in the foreground, along with the two standing human figures by the maroon truck on the left, are all S scale (1:64), hence larger in scale than my railroad. The Colorado & Southern locomotive, engineer, and conductor discussing their next switching move, as well as the two individuals watching on from the King Hotel front porch to the right, are all 1:72 scale figures. (There are…