Model Train Layout Design on The New England Berkshire & Western

The New England, Berkshire & Western is an imaginary line running between Troy, New York and Chateaugay, New York with a hidden track continuing on to Montreal. How did the club choose this area? Basically, because we were here, but then we saw Jim Shaughnessy's books, Rutland Road and Delaware and Hudson, and so that kind of was the inspiration. Have you decided to concentrate only on 1950 now? Yeah, we started trying to figure out how to do a modern session, and everything we were modeling, every scene, was taken down, abandoned, destroyed, something by the end of the fifties, early sixties. Well, at one time you had both modern groups and fifties operating groups and what happened there? Well, we didn't have any scenes. Right. And so, I mean, it's like once we started putting industries in place, it was kind of hard to figure out what would be still there. And we'd have like a passenger train one day, an Amtrak train one direction each way, instead of like 14 or so passenger trains. It's important to the club to have buildings that would actually be there in the time period you're modeling, isn't it? You don't really stretch it very much. Now we try to match, to kind of do a systems approach to everything, to model the entire kind of network of the industries, the freight cars, the operations, everything together. A lot of research involved. Yeah. Most clubs have trouble sticking to something that stringent, let's say, and wind up appealing to the lowest common denominator. How do you avoid that? Well, first of all, I think that's the kind of something that we do try to strive for, because otherwise the lowest common denominator tends to be the person who doesn't model. And so to make it enjoyable for the people who want to do really good modeling, we try to keep the standards up. Well, well, how do you do that without alienating people? Or do you alienate them and say, "Okay, bye bye." No, what we try to do is we try to educate people. I mean, normally we got a lot of members coming in who don't have much background in modeling, and they tend to be the ones who quickly learn, and I think you can teach people kind of the right way to do it, or a right way to do something rather than having to go through 20 wrong ways before you get to the right way. Well, are you starting mainly with greenhorns, as they come into the club, or? Pretty much. I mean, we get some very talented people, particularly outsiders coming in, and sometimes teaching us, but the bulk of the membership starts off with knowing nothing. Has the modeling and the operating philosophy of the club changed over the years? It's probably tightened, because we started basing things on different scenes, and we had no idea what we were doing, 'cause a lot of these places were gone by the time we started modeling them. And so it was through research we slowly discovered what places look like, and then why they looked that way. And so we began to say, "Oh, this is really neat. "Let's do it the way they did it."