I've been waiting a long time for this

The CTC Railway is the fulfillment of a longtime dream: To model a piece of the Tennessee River valley with a Norfolk Southern mainline and a small, industrial branchline serving riverside, barge-fed industries. I started watching trains in the years 1990-1995 in Chattanooga, Tenn., and have always wanted to recreate all those spots and sites in miniature. Now I can do that, in the basement of our new house in Roanoke, Va.

At the time we lived in Chattanooga I built two N-gauge layouts that never really got finished, but that had some beautiful scenery and nice features. When we moved to Florida I sold all my N stuff and switched to HO, mostly because my railroading had to be done in the garage and the dirt made N-gauge track maintenance a nightmare. And it just stank being out there in the heat as well.

For the next 11 years, my railroading consisted of that little-used, HO garage branchline and then, in Sarasota, an HO 8X4 that I carried into the house when I wanted to run it. Lean times. I amused myself by brewing my own beer instead (which I still do).

But now we're back in the land of seasons and hills and plentiful trains, and I have a newly finished basement in which to run wild. As I write this the project is well under way.

My space allowance was probably pretty generous by most people's standards, but it was still a challenge to get in the major elements I wanted: a respectable Norfolk Southern main line, a looooong branch line into North Chattanooga from the old Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific section of the main line, the imposing Tenbridge over the Tennessee River and a yard to interchange between the main and the branch.

Faced with a space about 26 feet by eight feet, since a wide corridor had to be left in the basement for wifely access to the garage from upstairs, my first move was to switch from HO, which I was never that thrilled with, back to N scale. This opened up the possibilities.

I got on eBay and sold my two Southern HO locomotives and bagged about $150. Enough for the track, anyway!

Some might find my layout a little boring. Not a lot of grade changes or mainline meets. No spaghetti-bowl of interconnected track. A small yard. Not a lot of electronic complexity. But what I am going for is a realistic feel here, of the place where I first really fell in love with trains. I like the gentle hills and little rock faces of Chattanooga, and the nautical feel of the inland waterway of the Tennessee River with the high mountain ridges in the distance. And industrial switching. There should be plenty of that.

All this took a while to rig into a track plan, which is the topic of the next entry.