Page 24 - January February 2017

Mackenzieville Yard & Glendale Junction Ian Wilson
Although I model predominantly in HO scale I've always had an urge to see what I could achieve in N scale — and had been collecting stock with the aim of having a layout to possibly exhibit in mind. The back of my VW Golf estate car with the seats folded flat presented the space challenge, and this gave me a maximum size of 70 inches by 40 inches to work to. So planning began!
Eastern Roads — especially in Pennsylvania — are my main interest, and in my prototype research for a location for the N scale layout I was continually drawn back to one location —Westwood Junction in Schuylkill County, at the heart of Reading Railroad's mine operations in hard coal country. This is a simple junction where a branch meets a main line, and would include a river bridge as on the prototype and the abandoned Lehigh Valley on a higher level.
Trains would pass through the junction (named Glendale Junction on the model) from a staging yard on the other side of the layout. As planning continued a thought came to me...
Why hide the staging yard away? Why not have some of the yard tracks visible to suggest a small marshalling yard. And so Mackenzieville Yard and a small depot were added to the plan. The yard tracks are long enough for a train to arrive and stop in view, and move out of sight later — and similarly trains in the opposite direction can pull forward into view until it is time for them to depart.
The layout is scheduled to appear in Kalmbach's Model Railroad Planning 2017, so the full story of planning and construction is told in that article.
Photos: Tony Wright
Right:
Reading GP35 #3621 leaving Mackenzieville Yard
with a local freight
24 ROUNDHOUSE February 2017