March 2019

My HO scale Agawa Yard layout is set in a fictional suburb of Vancouver, B.C., in the spring of 1969. It’s part of a single-track main line that zig-zags through the suburbs and provides rail access to the area’s dwindling towns and industries.

My layout is based on 1960s photos of the Canadian Pacific (CP), and it’s fair to say that the railroad was in pretty rough shape at the time. I’ve tried to convey this in the rolling stock, locomotives, and buildings by weathering them heavily.

Some model railroaders are lucky enough to design their layout, then build their train room around it. Most have the opposite problem: we design our layouts to fit into existing bedrooms, basements, dens, attics, and outbuildings.

That’s the sort of problem I encountered when we moved to a new home several years ago – a home that had a two-room finished den officially designated as the model railroad area. While designing a track plan around existing obstacles was a frustratingly fun exercise in itself, it did present several challenges, the largest of which was trying to gracefully blend the layout into two existing living spaces while doing the least amount of damage to either. One of the main obstacles was a bookshelf built into the wall that separates the two rooms.

Growing up in the 1960s, I got hooked on the Rock Island Line. At that time I lived in central Iowa in the small town of Nevada on the Rock Island’s Mid-Continent Route that ran between St. Paul, Minn., and Kansas City, Kan. This line is also called the Spine Line, and is still operated today by the Union Pacific RR.

In the 1960s the proposed merger of the Rock Island with the Union Pacific RR was under prolonged review by the Interstate Commerce Commission. The merger never happened, contributing to the Rock’s bankruptcy in 1980. Even though its physical plant was in decline when I started watching trains, to me the Rock Island of the 1960s was always “a mighty fine line.”