Welcome to the Nebraska & Southwestern Railroad. This is a blog to capture my adventure creating an N scale model railroad layout based on the Burlington Northern railroad set in Nebraska during the late 1990s. Follow along and be sure to subscribe!
I recently installed the first sound decoders on the layout in a pair of BN SD40-2s. Here they are pulling a freight around the layout.
Sometimes it is easier to see the plan with a “diagram” rather than the layout plan. This is a diagram showing the layout as a point to point (removing the doorway crossing). As you can see, you start at the “South yard” and work down the mainline switching various industries until you reach the interchange yard at the other end. There you can pickup/drop off, run around your train, and head back to the “South Yard”. I guess I should…
All of the track has been laid and wired! This is a fully functioning railroad! There is possibly one more industry to add if/when I decide where and how it will work. For now though I am considering it an operating railroad. I setup an operating scenario tonight and ran thru it. Works pretty slick! I did make one last minute semi major change. I never liked the interchange area. It just always looked odd in my opinion. I ended…
And we have a yard! And its backwards from the plan! I started to layout the yard and where the operator was going to stand and quickly realized that there was going to be some congestion. I decided to rework the whole yard by flipping it around and I actually like this better. Here is the latest plan with the green tracks being the completed portion. It took a bit or ripping up and reworking both corners to make it…
I put one more industry in today, which is pretty much the end of what I can do with the track supplies I have on hand. I did finally get everything I need to finish the track ordered. Hopefully in the next week or so I will have a chance to make a push to get all of it laid. It is pretty cool to have enough track down to leave all of the locos and cars on the track…
Not really much I can do now until I get a bunch more switches and track. The trains themselves are setup and ready to go. I am not going to do much scenery until I get all of the track down. So…break out the buildings! First up is the grain elevator. It still needs painted, decaled, etc. however it is on the layout!
I spent a better part of the evening working with every locomotive, resetting, setting up speed tables for speed matching, consisting, changing lighting, you name it. I learned a lot about JMRI and feel pretty good about things. I have 6 consists setup and ready to go. My roster is made up of these consists 4 BN C30-7 2 BN SD40-2 with fuel tender between) 2 BN SD60M 2 Oakway SD60 2 BN SD70MAC 1 LMX Dash 8-40B and…