Prescott & Madawaska Layout

- Layout Summary and Plan -

The Prescott and Madawaska was featured a while back as "Webmasters Choice" on the NMRA web site.

Here's a brief description of my HO scale railroad layout. It occupies part of the basement of our Ontario home and represents my third attempt at a "reasonable" pike.
The layout is a mixture of urban downtown, small towns and rural scenes set someplace in Ontario, Canada in the summer of 1961. The location is fictitious and follows a mid-Ontario theme using authentic city names.
Why free lance? I model freelanced scenes because I find that prototypical modelling is too restrictive for my free flowing and colourful imagination. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

Layout Summary

Name: ......... Prescott and Madawaska Valley District Railway
Scale: ........ HO (1:87), standard gauge
Prototype: .... Freelance Canadian National
Locale: ....... Mid Ontario, Canada
Period: ....... Summer 1961 (1957 - 1961)
Height: ....... 44" to 48"
Benchwork: .... 1" x 4" pine "L" girder
Roadbed: ...... 0.5" Homasote® on top of 0.5" / 0.75" plywood in the yards and flat areas. Cork on top of 0.5" plywood elsewhere
Size: ......... 11' x 16'
Track: ........ Shinohara and Railcraft, code 70. Some hand laid code 70.
Turnouts: ..... Shinohara code 70 (#6, #8, #8 curved)
Two hand laid crossovers, code 70
Curve radii: .. 24" minimum
Grades: ....... 2% maximum
Scenery: ...... Plaster hard-shell
Structures: ... Scratch built from styrene or wood or heavily modified plastic or plaster kits
Control: ...... North Coast Engineering (NCE) DCC control

As you will see in the photographs of my structures, I have tried to capture a lot of 'character' in this layout. It's this "character" I really enjoy.
Here is a rough plan of the layout. It allows either point-to-point or continuous operation (or both together if I feel in an adventurous mood). This plan has been greatly simplified from the layout plan, but it's accurate enough to give you a good idea of the P&M:

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