The Midland Belt Railroad

Good evening everyone,

I wanted to start a thread here to chronicle the construction of my HO scale home layout, the Midland Belt Railroad - or at least a small part of it anyway - set in the fictional location of Allen City, Kentucky.

There is actually a real place in Kentucky by that name, but it's a city in name only, being more like a small town, and certainly with no heavy industry. It does have a railroad though.

The fictional history of the railroad is deliberately vague, and the name comes from a FREEMO group that I used to belong to. The idea for this small portion of the Midland Belt is that it runs into the downtown part of Allen City to a small classification yard known as Harrison Yard, where inbound and outbound cars are sorted to come and go from the industrial branch that spreads through the older, dirtier parts of town.

Though the right of way is owned and operated by the Midland Belt, both the Southern Railway and Louisville and Nashville have trackage rights, and the use of motive power on the branch is somewhat fast and loose.

Both the Southern and the L&N have some old, dare we say knackered, switch engines that are semi-permanently based out of Harrison.

From Harrison, the branch heads through a short tunnel under a commercial district before entering a section of street running through a particularly dilapidated area of the city. Once trains go beyond this, they enter the districts of Thawne, and it's main arterial route for goods traffic by road, West Allen Street. Beyond this, there is a short spur to a heavy metals industry known as the Handy Company, and here the branch splits to go further into the heart of the city.

This is the modelled section, and the rest of the branch is represented by a hidden staging track behind the backscene of the Handy Co plant.

Industries throughout the district are as below:

• Handy Co: Heavy metals plant.[/*]
• Noel's Fuel and Merchantile: Coal trestle and warehouse[/*]
• An as yet unnamed Chemical plant[/*]
• West Allen Street team track: A general team track and TOFC unloading facility[/*]
• Davis Brothers: A large foodstuffs factory and grain elevator[/*]
• Palmer Construction: a cement, timber and general construction materials and tool merchant.[/*]
• Vilas Brothers: A paint manufacturer who mix and can paints.[/*]

Below is a link to a Flickr album with the current "completed" section of the layout.

I'm currently working on the street running section, and have just finished laying track and wiring it up.
The layout is currently functional from the Handy Co spur all the way to the Harrison Yard yard-throat.
Tracklaying will continue once the scenery is to a satisfactory level on the streetrunning board, on which I've just started laying the road itself, and am working on several structure projects to populate the scene.
https://flic.kr/s/aHskRt1PTD

 

Thanks chaps, much appreciated.

Progress has been a bit all over the place recently, as I've been working on projects in a bit of a shotgun approach - a little bit of everything.

So I thought I'd just pop a few pictures of up projects I have done something with.

Firstly, I completed a modified build of Clevermodels Smitty's Music Shop. My fellow modeller Ford is working on some lighting for the shop, so I've not made the interior yet, so the building isn't attached to it's foundation - so you might see a few gaps!






Next, a Southern caboose which has had a very rough weathering job:



I've also done a little work extending the benchwork of Harrison Yard to allow for an additional 3 tracks along the front of the yard, but I don't think I actually like this, as it encroaches way too far into the layout room for my liking, so I'm thinking of removing it again:



I finally got around to putting a backdrop image inside the Handy Co shipping warehouse, but I think it's going to need more work to look the part.



Next, this Bachmann Norfolk and Western wide vision caboose has had the cupola narrowed to represent an accurate NW example, as they never actually had any EV cabooses.



I've also fitted a blackout blind to my layout room window to protect the layout from the summer sun...



...and built myself a workbench/desk to set up my JMRI hosting laptop to allow for computerisation of the layout.



Finally, this turned up yesterday, going to have fun building it...



...and I'm waiting on delivery of a 3D printer to start building my own rolling stock, structures, locos, detail parts, etc.

Busy, busy busy!

 

Cheers Gary,

I've been really impressed with Clevermodels since I found their Plant #2 kit, and now own about 90% of the kits and textures they produce.

The buildings are all printed on paper rather than cardstock, and I essentially laminate them onto cardstock, foamboard or thin ply, depending on what I need and where they'll have to fit in on the layout.

I'm currently recording a video series for Railtalk on building cardstock kits, the first of which should be part of episode #5 of their show - I think.

Here's a few more builds of their stuff I've done:

Hoosier Mama's Pies:






Wally's Merchantile (kitbashed):










Habbaker's Garage:

 

Cheers Chris!

Shocking as this might be, this interpretation of the Midland Belt Railroad is no more!

West Allen Street, along with the Thawne and Handy Company extensions, and my entire HO scale collection have been sold, and are being picked up this weekend so I can start again in my first love - N scale.

I've got a 10' exhibition layout to have ready for October, so if best get cracking on the build!