Burlington Northern’s mainline through the Rocky Mountains of western Montana is the setting for this 20 by 32 foot mushroom style, multi-deck layout. The trains will traverse over 400 feet of single and double track mainline, with helper engines shoving hard to get the tonnage up the grade from Essex, MT east to the summit of Marias Pass. While this area of Montana does not feature much on-line industry, the cities of Whitefish and Columbia Falls will provide necessary switching activity along with a branchline out of Essex to Plum Creek Lumber and Essex quarry. Additionally, a secondary line to Kallispell will provide additional traffic density through Columbia Falls. The predominant commodity will be forest products, but the layout will stretch east to Cutbank, MT with grain elevators providing plenty of wheat to be loaded into covered hoppers for movement to customers. Throw in the constant flow of EMD SD40-2′s and GP50′s along with GE LMX lease units pulling intermodal traffic from the Pacific Northwest ports to destinations in the Midwest and this railroad will be non-stop action from start to finish.
Digitrax DCC will be the control system. Centralized Traffic Control will be utilized for traffic management and Shenware car cards and waybills will be my car-forwarding method.
The unique feature that this layout will provide is a second layout in N Scale of Great Falls, MT to provide additional switching activity for operators as well as satisfy my desire to model in N scale. This layout will be in the office located adjacent to the layout room.
