Exclusive American - passionately Union Pacific

Introduction
The layout is housed in a room roughly 5.5m x 5.8m. Work on the need for a layout room started on 3 August 2005, when alterations were made to our house to add a second storey, this being necessary to accommodate a layout room above our kitchen. After two years of preparation to the room, work finally started on the bench work on 1 January 2007. Many months of hard work resulted in a double level layout linked with a six level helix, connecting the lower level at a height of 800mm to the upper level at a height of 1400mm.

Locos and rolling stock on our HO layout are exclusively American, with my passion being Union Pacific although I do have quite a few other road names on the layout. The time period spans from the late 19 th century to whenever, the idea being if it happened on the prototype then I can model it! Steam and diesel motive power will haul passenger and freight trains on the partly double track main line. Union Station, which is a terminus passenger station, will be a central feature of the layout, which will link many smaller stations, which will service an industrial / farming community. Along the journey the locos will be serviced and maintained at the large Roundhouse and 130 ft turntable facility before crossing a large wind(ow) bridge (no pun intended) before entering the helix to descend the pass. It will cross a low level bridge before entering a large freight yard. Serviced trains leave the yard and travel along the double mainline to the balloon station at the end of the run where facilities exist to turn the whole train, rename it and later return it to the Union Station.

The whole layout will be controlled by DigiTrax and most of the locos are decoder equipped, with about 15 of them being sound equipped. At the time of writing this summary lots of work is still needs to be done, however we all know that a Model Railroad Hobby is never complete, my aim is to have it viewable by all on 15 September 2007.

Big Boy 4-8-8-4
A framed composite photograph of #4017

Layout Room
A view of the 5.5m x 5.8m layout room - showing the two levels

Window Bridges
The 3 window bridges still to be contructed
A Rivarossi Big Boy is crossing the lowest bridge in the foreground

Helix
Inside the 1600mm diameter helix

Sliding Lift out
Greg made this lift out sliding panel to enter the layout