Designing the Layout - What Does it Do?

"My philosphy of railroading? Get it from here to there as quickly and cheaply as possible. That leaves more time for tequila!"
- Peppy

When you are planning to build a layout, planning is a key part of the process and one that should be given the utmost importance. For the Penoles Mining Railroad (PMR) we need to start with the first and most important question:

What does the railroad do?

For the answer we must go to the prototype. The Penoles takes silver ore from the mines down steep inclines to the smelter where it is processed and shipped out by rail to the cities who use it. There! We have a purpose. Moving silver ore. We have an origin (mines) and a destination (smelter).

Time and place are important for many reasons. While we don't want to be too prototypical (which takes lots of our modeling time and oh so many pesos) we do want to capture a snapshot in time so that our modeling can be targeted to the time period, which adds realism. For this layout we'll need to use 1900, plus or minus a few years. The place, why Ojeula, Mexico of course!

Once you have a time and place, the next thing is to look for key features on the prototype that you want to represent on the layout that make the layout feel like the prototoype. Notice I didn't say look like the prototype. There is a difference. In this case the mine alone is large enough in O-scale to consume an entire basement. The suspension bridge is over 1,000 feet long, which is over 20 real feet long! What we want to capture is "flavor".

Flavor in this case will mean sleep slopes, inclines, the suspension bridge, the rocky countryside and the mine.

So our layout will have a mine and a smelter. Also a suspension bridge. That was easy! In order to maintain locomotives we'll need some kind of service buildings. We'll also need a town where people live that work in the mines and probably some miner's homes.


Summary:

Purpose: move silver ore from the mines to the smelter

Time and Place: 1900's Ojuela, Mexico

Key Features: silver mine, smelter, suspension bridge, town, engine servicing facilities