PRR Stillwater Division: My early "transition era"

As the years went on, I managed to accumulate a couple of storage totes worth of track, rolling stock, second-hand buildings, kits, tools, and other supplies. I started at one point to make another layout based on the plans for the Gulf Summit & Susquehanna Valley (N-109 from "Nine N Scale Model Railroads" by Armstrong and Stepek), with the intention to be able to store it by leaning against a wall. I soon realized that after I added the necessary terrain, it would probably be too heavy, even using the Woodlands Scenics foam SubTerrain System.

Eventually I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and make that layout. After some research, I decided to use a standard 80"x 36" door as the base. It would be portable enough that I could store it in the storage facility that we also used for our camping equipment and our Christmas decorations.

Now there were actual decisions to be made. I had very vague plans to this point: make a model railroad. That wouldn't be good enough to start laying track.

It didn't take very long to come up with some requirements.

1. Yard must have water tower, coaling tower, turntable, and roundhouse.
2. Dual main line
3. Minimum of one tunnel
4. Some operations capability
5. Loop for continuous running (railfan capability)
6. At least one steam engine

I found Scarm software, and started to go to work on layout design.

Very quickly I discarded the turntable and roundhouse requirements - there was no way they would fit in the necessary footprint of an oval with a couple of industries and a small mountain. I also decided to not use dedicated staging, but to include a very small classification yard and a couple of sidings that could double as staging. The double main line also quickly shrank to a single.

Probably because I have vague preschool memories of watching seemingly endless coal trains along the Monongahela River when I was on trips to Monessen, Pennsylvania with my grandparents, I decided to go with a coal theme. So a coal mine was mandatory. (I was probably heading down that path anyway, remember the first model that I built.) That led to a logical coal consumer - a power plant. (There was no way I would be able to fit a steel mill - and at that point I didn't realize that steel mills don't consume coal directly.)

Search as I might, I couldn't find any locations which had all three of those (yard, mine, and plant) within a reasonable distance of each other, so without regrets I decided that the layout would be "protolance". (What is "protolance"? Protolance is a combination of prototypical and freelance modeling. According to My First Model Railroad, it is "when you take the realistic elements of how a real railroad runs, and combine them with fictional locations or railroads".)

The PRR Stillwater Division never existed in real life. However, both the Pennsylvania Railroad and Stillwater, PA do exist. More on the town Stillwater later. At this point in its evolution I only thought of it as "my railroad", existing somewhere in Pennsylvania.

To be as flexible as possible, I decided to model in the "transition era" (when railroads were transitioning from steam to diesel). This had multiple advantages: it fit with my coal theme, and it is reasonably popular in the hobby so there would be good sources of kits and rolling stock. Plus my very early childhood overlapped with what are considered the last years of the transition era.

After a couple of months of fiddling, I had a layout that I was willing to consider building. I put a yard along the south side (bottom) and a couple of spurs off of the siding on the north that could be used for staging. There was a main east-west line just north of the yard, and I included a wye to simulate an interchange, but primarily to allow changing an engine's direction in lieu of a turntable. All the turnouts would be Atlas standard (since I had accumulated a good number of them in the preceding years) and the tightest radius would be 11".