by Robert Mountenay/photos by the author
Welcome back to Barchester, Pennsylvania! If you enjoyed the first visit we made in March 2023 (“A Trackplan from Simulation to Reality”), I’ve made numerous changes and improvements since then. Barchester, you may remember, is my fictional rural branch line terminal on the Pennsylvania Railroad. While most people associate PRR with heavy-duty railroading, the railroad has been called “the world’s longest short line” because of the extensive web of branch lines it once operated. My layout represents the stub end of a branch line that meanders through a fictional county in the Susquehanna Valley.
Background
Conceptually, Barchester is the seat of the smallest (fictional) county in central Pennsylvania. Despite its small size, a family powerful in Keystone State politics calls Barchester home and has been influential enough to keep the Pennsy serving their region with daily passenger accommodations — in the form of a mixed train — as late as the modeled era, 1949.
The name of the town comes from a favorite series of novels, The Chronicles of Barchester, written by nineteenth century British author — and inventor of the mailbox — Anthony Trollope. He created a wonderful cast of mid-Victorian characters in a fictitious cathedral town called Barchester. Trollope called it “a little bit of England which I myself have created.” I feel the same way about my Barchester, though, unlike its namesake, this one is in Pennsylvania Dutch country, not the west of England. Before Germans (so-called “Pennsylvania Dutch”) arrived in the mid-eighteenth century, the original settlers of Pennsylvania were British. As a result, many municipalities have British namesakes. It made perfect sense for my fictional Pennsylvania town to have a fictional United Kingdom name. I want the world I’ve created to have both character and plausibility. Only time will tell whether I’ve succeeded.
ABOVE: PRR 7099 has just dropped off an Erie Railroad Fowler-style boxcar at Jacobs Lumber. The Jacobs complex offers building supplies, coal, and petroleum products and is served by two sidings on the east end of town.
Barchester sits in a corner of our basement family room and shares space with a fireplace, a comfortable seating area, a dining table, a bar, my wife’s large sewing-embroidery machine, and my small workbench (there’s a bigger one, as well as a paint station, in the back room). While the environs may sound crowded, it’s really quite spacious and comfortable. My wife Deb and I wanted togetherness in our retirement, and that’s exactly what we got. Both of us had jobs where we were constantly on call and seldom shared days off because of our respective schedules. Now we’re free to pursue our hobbies while watching reruns of childhood TV shows or listening to music, all while enjoying one another’s company. We’ve found our Shangri-La in the basement, and we’re loving every minute of it!
Track Planning
We bought the house atop the basement in 2019, the year before my wife and I retired. By that time, I had become friends with ace track planner Rob Chant, and told him that I’d like to build a branch line terminal-themed layout after I retired. Collecting my “givens and druthers,” he came up with the fabulous design that became Barchester. While many have observed that the plan
recalls John Armstrong’s classic switching layout from Atlas’s Custom Line layouts book, Rob was actually inspired by the real-world hometown terminal of a south-central Pennsylvania short line, the Stewartstown Railroad.
ABOVE: The Jacobs compound dominates the east end of the layout. The coal trestle is a Mil-Scale kit, the tanks are from Grandt Line, the lumber racks are from Bar Mills, and the warehouses are scratchbuilt. The lumber yard spur also serves as the lead to the creamery, so it must be cleared before milk cars are dropped off or picked up.
When Rob designed the trackplan in 2019 I hadn’t yet decided whether the layout would depict a branch of the Reading, the Pennsy, or a short line like Stewartstown. The Pennsy won out, largely because of the availability of nicely detailed, smooth-running H class 2-8-0s from Broadway Limited and MTH. The promise of an up-coming E6 4-4-2 sealed the deal.
The wye-centric plan translates nicely into a Class I branch line terminal, especially with the fairly generous runaround track. A wye provides the only runaround on the prototype Stewartstown terminal; both Rob and I felt this would be quite limiting, given the small space we had available for the wye. Despite its compact size, I’ve found the wye to be useful, not only for turning locomotives and other rolling stock, but also as a secondary runaround, and as a yard track, particularly when working the switchback siding on the east end of the layout.
ABOVE: PRR 7099 picks up a Rapido X-31 boxcar at Barset Furniture. Furniture factories were found throughout York County until the 1960s. Some made radio and later television cabinets and others specialized in tables. Lumber, hardware, and coal are delivered to the factory, and finished products are shipped out.
Construction
Construction began shortly after our move to Pennsylvania in the summer of 2020. I built the layout with 1×3” frame covered with ¼” plywood and 2” foam. The benchwork is attached to IKEA Ivar shelving units that also hold my railroad library.
Track is mostly Peco Code 83, with a few pieces of Atlas Code 83 thrown in, particularly the sharply curving legs of the wye, where Snap Track maintains a perfect 18” radius. I would have preferred using Code 70 rail to represent lighter branch line track, but when I began construction, the No. 5 and No. 4 wye turnouts Rob’s trackplan required were not available. I feel Code 83 is a decent compromise, especially when it’s been weathered, ballasted, and properly weeded up. I like the way cork roadbed provides a smooth base for the track as well as establishing a natural centerline. I achieved a reasonably low branch line ballast profile by bringing scenery right up to the track in most places…
