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Deciding On An Era For The Layout

The past few days I have been contemplating on an era for my N scale layout.  Originally I was planning on just doing a make shift layout so I could run any engine/cars that I wanted too, but the more and more I thought about it, I realized choosing an era I think would be more fun to build and collect.

As I mentioned in an ealier post, I grew up right next to the old Chicago & Northwestern (C&NW) West Line heading out of Chicago and have very fond memories of seeing the trains bearing the C&NW logos on them while playing ball in the streets and picking up my father from the train station.  So I thought to myself that is what I want to model, the C&NW pre-1987.  Why pre-1987 you might ask, 1987 is when they opened the new Ogilvie Transportation Center in downtown Chicago that the C&NW/Metra Commuter trains termiinated at.  The previous station that was torn down was known as Northwestern Terminal.

Original Northwestern Terminal


Now back in 1987 being only 13 years old, I thought it was cool to see a brand new train station all built with glass...new is better, right...boy was I wrong.  As an adult now, I can see the beauty of keeping all of the older buildings around for as long as possible.  How can we show our children the old history that once was if we keep on tearing down buildings and building new.

Current Ogilvie Transportation Center


Now do not get me wrong, I am still going to be running a few out of era trains that I think would be cool to collect, like my 2016 Metra Operation North Pole and the Disney trains/cars I will be collecting, but I think the majority of what I am going to try and collect will be related to the C&NW, and that includes the diesel freight engines along with passenger service engines/cars, along with Metra.

Walther’s has a kit they call ‘Union Station’ which I think will make a pretty good ‘Northwestern Terminal’ for my layout and will also be the main center piece.  It really was this kit that gave me the idea to build my layout based on the C&NW.  I really could have also used the kit for the actual Union Station in Chicago, but the C&NW never terminated at that station (and as stated above, the C&NW is what I grew up with seeing).  Plus I really feel that the kit more resembles Northwestern Terminal than Union Station, manily in the number of columns.  Unions Station in Chicago has quite a bit more.

Walther’s Union Station which will be my Northwestern Terminal
Passenger platforms

Now that I have the center piece for my layout, how am I going to design the rest of it.  I knew I always wanted the outside line of my layout to be mainly the freight service, and the two inside lines passenger service.  So I came up with the following breakdown.


Yellow = Rural area.
Green = Suburban area.
Blue = City are (which will have the Northwestern Terminal).
Red = Industrial area.

That is my plan for now.  I am hoping to start collecting a bunch of building and getting them laid out on the board so I can see how they all fit.  I want to squeeze in as much as possible as not to have any dead space on the track board.

Sunday I will be heading to a swap meet in Michigan City, IN.  Hoping to find some buildings for the layout.

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