Model Railroading on the Cheap

Stories about the industries found on my room sized layout and their perceived activities.

  This chapter will show how you don’t have to have a big layout to have lots of freight operation.  Parts of this chapter were done a few years earlier but the story still has value in support of the overall theme of lots of operation on little money. The town of Hillton represents a major industrial complex at the edge of town (paper tall building flats). This is an attempt to put most of our industries up on a pedestal easily seen and tended to from either inside or outside the operation pit for our peddler freight switching operation.   

       This photo is a good overall view of the largest industrial operation in Hillton – the major industrial community on the Y&H. Here at the upper end of Hillton there is a junk yard, a travel trailer works, WREX, a bulldozer factory, a car cleaning operation. Also a small engine service facility.  A scrap yard can be a big time industry handling gondola cars with interesting loads on a small layout.  Hopefully my writing will dispel the notion that you must have a large layout to have lots of industrial action. Perhaps this is a good picture to lead into short photo stories about the industries and some of the traffic they can generate on this room sized HO scale layout.  There is lot of reading here; perhaps it would be wise to jot down your page number for easy return after an absence. Or print the index page and mark it when you read it.