Concept Track Planning for Granite Mountain Railway
Doug GeigerDescription
One of the most enjoyable aspects of railroad modeling is that modelers have the ability to create their own little worlds. You pick the scenery, trains, tracks, time period, routes, and every other aspect of the layout. Modelers can include inspiration found from real life railroads, other models that influenced them, and photographs from magazines or books. It is important to collect all these inspirations that you want to include in your layout for later concept track planning.
In this video, Doug Geiger shows Allen Keller his notebook of collected ideas for concept tracking planning. His concept drawings include notes on what features from his observations and research of railroads he wanted to emulate in his model. This is a great way for yourself and others to visualize what you want to achieve with your layout.
Another choice modelers can make on their layout is the time period. This is a regret that Geiser has found in his Granite Mountain Railway. The railroad is not modeled after a specific time period. With such a large layout requiring around 400 cars to run it, picking, researching, and executing a specific time period was not a priority.
In his layout, Geiger’s priority was smooth operation. Although some of the trains are out of place together, such as running both diesel and steam, Geiger has found that while operating his large railroad, the congruity in the trains is not what’s important. Where the focus lies instead, is on meeting the schedules and getting his trains to the right stations at the right time.
I got a whole notebook full of ideas and things that I've seen, the track plans that I've liked and stuff. Let me share a little of that with you, Allen. Okay. This is a bit of sort of the finished step that comes with concept track planning. It gives me ideas like, "Oh, I'd like to have low hills and track work "like was around Texarkana and maybe I'd like to have "a real steep side of a grade like the Rio Grande did "up Giant's Ladder over Rawlins Pass," and so on and so on. And this is, I boil this out of all my experiences and my train trips and things I've seen in the real world. And I've got several pages of those kind of things. Along with that, I like to get real specific things and specific in terms of track plans. For example, here was an article that was in this magazine, and let me show it to you. It was actually a picture of the Milwaukee over Hall Creek Bridge, and the Cascade Mountains in Washington, and I just liked the way the scene kinda looked, and if I could do that same sort of idea in a model railroad, with maybe a peninsula and being able to look through the two bridges like was on the Hall Creek. Yeah. Why didn't you actually pick a certain time period? well, I wish I had. But the problem was, we knew it was a big layout. And it takes about 400 cars to run the layout. And when you're the only one building the thing, and operations is foremost, and sort of the era-picking came second, we wanted to make sure the railroad would run first. So that's why we've done a lot of the quick and easy cars first. We didn't worry a whole lot about the era. We do steam and diesel, mixed, and you'll see sometimes a 484 Northern pulling a string of Superliner cars. I know that's a little odd, but when you operate-- You have fun. And when you operate a big layout like mine, it doesn't really seem to enter in. It's not a problem, it's a train. Yeah. And you don't really, you're the engineer, you don't really care that it was a steam engine or it was an SD40 or whatever. You just realize it's a train and you've got schedules to meet and you've gotta be at this town at this time on a fast clock.
Running "diesel and steam" is not incorrect if you have the right time period. For example, the early 1950's on the Southern Pacific had both diesels and steam.