Roger Russell's On3 and Sn3 Layouts

Your ON3 engine won first place at the '93 narrow gauge convention. In San Antonio. In San Antonio. Tell me about that. Well, that was a lot of fun. I wanted to do something a little different that I never saw at a narrow gauge convention, and really what I did with that little guy, it started out as a kit, and I soldered it together as a precision scale. And again, I looked at photos and detailed that out, painted it, but I wanted to animate it, 'cause I never saw anything really animated, and my feeling today is that you have to go one step a little further to make things a little different. In a contest. Yes, especially in a contest. The ante keeps going up every year. Right, so what I did was I animated this little guy, and it ran for four days with the sound and the lights and it drove the people who were fanning... Oh yes, they went absolutely crazy. But it worked. Roger, are all your structures scratch-built, or do you use kits? Some are kits, some are scratch. Which do you like best? Scratch, and I've learned that I'd rather have freelancing. 'Cause by the time I got to doing the Backwoods Railroad, and I didn't have to do a specific scene and a specific scene over here, just gave me the opportunity to just go at it. Creative. Yes. On the SN3 layout, you're duplicating scenes, on the O scale layout, you're duplicating scenes. Some scenes, yes. I started building an SN3 layout on plywood and open grid, and I had trouble getting my rolling stock to run properly, and locomotives to run properly. And I worked on this a couple months. A friend of mine, I called him up, he came over one evening, and it was John Lemon. And in, I hate to say it, but three hours, that whole layout came down. Oh my. It was just, it was totally destroyed, and basically... You had serious trouble. Yes, yes, what I learned was that you've gotta have a good foundation, and everything builds upon that foundation, and if your foundation isn't proper for your locomotives or isn't pretty true for your locomotives and rolling stock, you're gonna have problems from there on in. Okay. So that's why- That's why I used, I started with the hollow core doors, and then I added something, the ceiling tile. Ceiling tile to fill what? What, does that give you elevation? No, you can A, for scenery, but B, it also sound-deadens your rolling stock. The SN3 Rio Grande Southern railroad represents mining in the 1940s. Some mining. What did you try to accomplish with this layout since it was your first layout? Well, again, that's what I saw in Colorado, and in those days, or even earlier, really, it was the mining that got all the railroads into the area and settled the area in Colorado. So it's kinda, again, if you're gonna do certain areas, you're gonna come across a mine for an industry or something like that. So it's just normal. Normal thing. You had to do it. If you were gonna do Colorado, you had to do mines. What are your favorite structures on that layout? The favorite structures are probably the largest ones, the Durango engine house, the Durango Depot itself, the scene, the scene of Durango, and I try to catch most of the flavor of it as it is today.