Plans

Davis-Murdoch Stone Company

Plan/Design

'Model Railroad' or 'Layout'?

A distinction without a difference?

When I was in grade school I went through a wide range of hobbies in rapid succession. My mother was an art teacher and my father taught mechanical drafting and photography, so they were more supportive of my whims that involved making things. Model ships then model airplanes then model cars. Eventually I showed an interest in model trains and my parents allowed me space and helped with construction of a layout.

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The setting and theme of a model railroad are prototype based

Back then, I was intent on building a
model railroad while my parents thought a layout would better suit my needs. In the June 1971 Railroad Model Craftsman, Bill Livingston's article about his On30 Venango Valley Railway explores the difference between the two. As Bill sees it, the setting for a model railroad exists on maps. A geographic place in a particular timeframe. The theme of a model railroad can be developed by studying historic publications, trade journals, and taking rail fan trips.

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The setting and theme of a layout are more about look and feel

The setting and theme of a layout are more about atmosphere. The setting is the room the layout occupies, and the theme is what the trains appear to be doing and how they are doing it. Bill sites the writing of
Lin Moody and the preservation work of Ellis Atwood for providing him the inspiration for building an On30 layout. Personally, I might credit the writing of Garth Groff, H. Reid and Archie Robertson about the Nelson & Albemarle Railroad for providing a story around which a layout could be built.

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Blocking together a scene with a hand painted backdrop and hand laid track

I would like my layout's setting to give a visitor the impression that the layout is hand made. I hand painted my backdrop, I hand laid my track. That motif will extend through construction of scenery and structures and even the locomotives and rolling stock. As Bill pointed out in his article, On30 is particularly well suited for hand made modeling. 30 inch gauge was never particularly popular among American railroads, so a 30 inch gauge layout seems to lack a priority on precisely depicting a prototype.

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Switching cars at the mill is very similar in On30 as it is in any other scale or gauge

I would like my layout's theme to give a visitor the impression that I am interested in operation. Operation, with its high priority on functionality, is far more common on model railroads than layouts. Many excellent model railroads featuring operation are being built right now, and I am interested in following their progress. But I am often dismayed to find out how few model railroaders understand that operation is possible on narrow gauge layouts. It is different, but the basics of car forwarding and train management are the same.

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Renderings do a better job of depicting the desired effect than mechanical drawings

Layout building, as my parents suspected, suits me. I like being able to interpret the historic facts and transfer them onto a project that is more creative and unique. A lot of creative thought goes into developing a scheme for operating my layout as well. The system should generate work for crews that complements the atmosphere and mood I am after.

Full Mock-Up Mode

Planning for extensions

Discussing my layout with Brian had led to the conclusion that, while construction was still in the early stages, accommodations needed to be made for extending the layout into three rooms again.

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A new trackplan for the stone cutting and mill area was drawn up.

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The plan showed the long back track exiting the layout room through the hole in the backdrop.

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Track and roadbed was pulled up far enough to build a curve that would allow the track to go through the hole.

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A cardboard pattern was made for cutting new roadbed and sub-roadbed.

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A cardboard pattern was also made for the revised mill trackage.


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The revised plan for this section of the layout showed the dust mill in this location. The old slate mill from my JRD On30 module was a stand-in to give an indication of what that would be like. I got the impression that the old locomotive service track was going to have to move closer to the aisle.


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In the opposite corner of the layout where I had just flipped the subroadbed to divert tracks into the shop next door, I cut a cardboard pattern. A new turnout would divert traffic to a fiddle yard in the shop or allow continuous running.

Discussions and Decisions

The route forward

A few years had passed since I removed the Winwood and Piedmont sections of my layout. That simplified the project and made it all fit in one room. Construction on the three room layout had stalled for years, and I found the one room version of the layout much more approachable and easier to work on. But over time progess began to lag on the one room layout as well.

My friend Brian Bond was in town and dropped by. We discussed my predicament. Brian was familiar with my layout when it ran in three rooms and had attended numerous operating sessions. From the standpoint of a visitor, the three room layout had a lot going for it. My shop is configured to accommodate a three room layout. Being in three rooms made the layout seem larger to an amazing degree. The flow of raw materials and finished products was more linear and obvious. The prospect of operating the three room version of the layout was far more appealing.

I had decided to reduce the size of the layout from three rooms to one immediately after turning over construction of the Railroad Display at
The Quarry Gardens to Rail Tales of Charlottesville. While I was working on the Railroad Display, my personal layout sat dormant and was in my way. Years went by without ever hosting an operating session. I wondered why the layout needed to extend into three rooms when there was plenty of space in the layout room alone. Upon removal of the layout from my office and shop, those spaces immediately benefitted from the layout's absense.

By the time of Brian's visit, I had fond memories of when the layout ran in three rooms. The problem had been that the layout "intruded" on the office and shop spaces, which were never planned adequately to have a section of the layout in them. Brian's suggestion for my route forward was to plan to extend the layout into three rooms again. An excellent idea that is reflected in the Project post titled "Redirection Along the Wall."

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Initial plans to extend the layout into three rooms again

Moving the Dust Mill

Reconfiguring operational elements

A primary ingredient in the mineral composition of soapstone in central Virginia is talc. Talc has a wide range of industrial applications and is a common component in the production processes of paint, paper, ceramics, and many other items. A dust mill is the facililty where a soapstone operation would crush and then mill the stone to a fine powder. The powder would be bagged and shipped to manufacturing plants.

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Dust Mill ruins at Schuyler

The vast majority of soapstone quarries yield stone of a quality such that every bit of it is milled into talc. Central Virginia is one of very few places where the integrity of the soapstone cut from the quarries is high enough for it to be formed into dimensional stone for architectural applications. Even so, much of the stone from these same quarries is flawed in some way that prevents it being suitable for sawing and polishing to make finished pieces. A good deal of the high quality stone that makes it into the assembly plant will end up as breakage or cut-off scrap. So the quarries and the assembly plant are both generating raw material for the dust mill, adding operational interest for the train crews.

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Mocking up a dust mill site

I am going to have a dust mill on my layout. I had to find a suitable location for it and suspected it could fit along the east wall so I grabbed a pile of structure pieces and parts to try to get an impression of what that would look like.

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Layout track plan including dust mill

The current plan for the dust mill and assembly plant:

A: The track that extends into the office to serve the unmodeled Quarry No. 2
B: Gangsaw building
C: Assembly plant
D: Boilerhouse
E: Dust mill
F: Supply sheds and loading area
G: Talc bagging plant

Planning Small Layouts



I referred to an Iain Rice book in a recent 'Projects' post


Finescale in Small Spaces is a book I pull out often, but it doesn't directly address my particular situation. It is written specifically as a guide for British layout design, therefore the specifics do not apply. But generally it presents ideas I can relate to, so I have tried to extract those ideas and reword them in my planning notes in order to make them more applicable to my layout.

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For example:

Rice is confident in the potential of small layouts to be worthwhile, interesting projects. They fit better into overall personal time and resource management. Significant progress can be made at a deliberate pace. Rice considers small layouts to be stage sets, the theater being a good resource for solutions to many situations on a layout that require suspension of disbelief:

  • Lose edges and create the illusion of wide open space
  • Natural and disguised entrances to storage tracks and staging
  • Setting that complements the Theme without obscuring or detracting
  • Uniformity that pulls the entire project together with tone, color, and texture
  • Sight lines and separate scenes creating a series of events as trains progress around the layout

These factors are far easier to address on small, simple layouts. In many ways it is more achievable for a small layout to be a good layout. My personal definition of a "good" layout is one that is a composed, functional display of the builder's interests, apptitudes, and abilities.

Transfer at the Wye

Reconfiguring operational elements

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A quick exploration of the idea to move the Transfer with the standard gauge rail connection to the wye, making it the first thing a visitor would see as they enter the layout room. For the longest time this area was going to be a quarry scene and I extended the backdrop extra low to accommodate the deep quarry between the tracks and wall.

I am now thinking the scene will still drop down between the tracks and wall, but there will be a coal yard in the hole instead of a quarry. A bucket-belt contraption will lift coal from the sunken coal yard up to load trucks and narrow gauge rail cars at track level.

The long tail of the wye that runs to the corner of the room will dissapear into a warehouse, the standard gauge track will run close against the back of that warehouse in order to hide the end-of-track in the corner. Or something like that. Will have to mockup the buildings in the corner to determine a reasonable solution for the corner.

Davis-Murdoch Trackplan


Reconfiguring operational elements


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Davis-Murdoch is an On30 layout in a 12 x 14 foot room

A shift in focal points

Compare this plan with the plan posted in December 2018. Almost every major element on the layout has shifted to a new position. I was compelled to do this because of the nagging feeling that Davis-Murdoch was no more than the remnant of my previous layout. I didn't want Davis-Murdoch to merely be the Piedmont & East Blue Ridge with its head and feet cut off.

It was very difficult for me to see the layout as anything other than what it had been for years. A few O scale narrow gauge modeling friends put up with a long series of emails from me exploring half baked ideas as I tried to see the smaller layout for what it was. Their feedback made it possible for me to consider reformating the operation.

The setting is still the western piedmont of central Virginia. The theme is still a soapstone operation. But the focal points have been shifted around to fit better on a one room layout. The center of operations is now in the upper right corner. Only one quarry is modeled on the peninsula of the layout with two more quarries unmodeled at the ends of branch lines running off the layout; one to a cassette in the office and the other to a small fiddle yard module that will sit on the workbench in my shop.

Once I came to this conclusion about the placement of the major elements in the stone handling workflows, I was comfortable with the whole concept. I am not making any guarantees – expressed or implied – that the details within each scene will resemble what is represented on this trackplan. But the general arrangement of the major elements should stay where they are shown.

Time for a review

Time has past, things have changed. It may be a good time to get reaquainted with the project.

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Alberene Stone, Schuyler, Va. - Google Earth

What was the Davis-Murdoch Stone Company?


Davis-Murdoch was bare, unpainted cinder blocks and stone slabs, rusted corrugated metal, old drums, broken pallets, cinder piles, broom sedge, scrub cedars and gum trees. The smell of coal smoke and heavy lube oil. Tan, rust, gray. Not well marked, very easy to miss.

Where was the Davis-Murdoch Stone Company?


Davis-Murdoch was somewhere in a region bounded roughly by Bremo Bluff to the east, Gladstone to the south, Piney River to the west, and North Garden to the north.

What remains of the Davis-Murdoch Stone Company today?

A general impression of Davis-Murdoch can be developed by visiting:
  • Alberene
  • Arvonia and Bridgeport
  • Bremo and New Canton
  • Cartersville
  • Cohasset
  • Columbia
  • Dilwyn
  • Esmont
  • Gladstone
  • James River State Park
  • Lovingston
  • Norwood
  • Schuyler
  • Scottsville

Is there information available related to Davis-Murdoch?

Operations like Davis-Murdoch are referred to in:

Rattling Through Town

The full sized plan is good for mocking up scenes


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I have always enjoyed visting small towns along the James River. Their primary attraction for me is the railroad running nearby, but many of them predate the railroad to the old canal days before a railroad was built on the towpath. They serve as the inspiration for this little scene I am mocking up on the full sized track plan. A scene I would love to run up on driving in Nelson County; a few company buildings at a crossroads with the weedy quarry tram running up an alley.

What scale is this?

My current Davis-Murdoch layout is a revision of my previous On30 layout.

Something occurred to me while I was ripping out sections of the old Piedmont & East Blue Ridge layout.

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The Piedmont & East Blue Ridge layout never made it this far

In all the time I built and operated the P&EBR, construction never advanced to the point where anything on the layout indicated what scale it was. Being On30, it could easily have been mistaken for an HO standard gauge layout. I had plenty of opportunities to remedy the situation but never did. Whether that insight is significant or not, it is affecting my approach to building Davis-Murdoch. I hope to define Davis-Murdoch as an O scale layout early and often.

Full Size on the Floor

I take a sketchpad on vacation.

My wife has a much greater tolerance for sitting in sand on the beach than I. While she is out at the breakers I am back at the cottage scribbling away on track plans.

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Last summer I enlarged one of my beach projects to full size and printed it out in about 2.5 by 3 foot tiles. I made registration holes in the ends of each tile so they could be assembled into larger sections using brass fasteners. I really like this perspective on the layout, it is definitely worth the effort to produce and assemble.

Layout Revisions

As illustrated in my recent Construction posts, I am removing the Piedmont and the Winwood sections of my layout.

Doing something like that never occurred to me until I was spending hours in my shop working on the Railroad Display for the Quarry Gardens at Schuyler. During that time, my attitude toward my shop in general and home layout in particular started to shift, and I became less interested in operating the layout and more interested in building a series of detailed scenes connected by a railroad. I started thinking that operating dioramas - a series of linked scenes built as if they were static displays - was really the most respectable approach to building the layout and was the way I would be happiest with it.



The revised plan shows the main mill with standard gauge sidings is to the left as you come in the door. These standard gauge sidings are the Piedmont & East Blue Ridge Railroad. They run off stage from the Mill up Cobblers Creek to the connection with the Outside Railroad. In reality they stop under an overhead traveling crane at the layout room wall in a narrow alley between two buildings. There will be a mirror under the crane.


Testing the idea of standard gauge in the Shops area

The balance of the layout is the narrow gauge tram that the Davis-Murdoch Stone Company uses to move stone and talc. Unlike before, the narrow gauge handles almost no “front end,” or finished product traffic. Now it is primarily “back end,” or raw material hauling. The only exception being a few narrow gauge boxcars routinely get loaded with bags of talc at the Dust Mill to be transferred to the standard gauge.

Before, my layout was like a narrow gauge version of the Nelson & Albemarle Railroad. Now, it is a more “typical” quarry operation. The layout used to run into the shop and office for operational reasons. As my interest in operation cooled, I considered how I could remove those two sections and still have a nice layout in a nice space. Fortunately, I only have to make a few track revisions and no benchwork revisions in the layout room in order to pursue this new idea.

Guide to Narrow Gauge

The mailman recently delivered my copy of a new model railroading book

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The book contains a few photos I took, as well as some information about my layout. I am delighted that Tony considered my material and that I was able to contribute to this project.

The general consensus among my fellow modelers is that
Guide to Narrow Gauge Modeling is geared toward someone who is interested in building a layout and is considering narrow gauge. Those of us who have already made the commitment to narrow gauge modeling may find the book a little too broad in scope and too thin in depth. Much like the “Wonderful World of Model Railroading” books I used to get for Christmas growing up, the subject matter is too complex to be effectively covered in an overview.

Indeed, when Tony Koester and I were emailing back and forth back in April, I was wondering if a book with resources pulled from here, there, and everywhere would lack overall coherance. But that was the editor’s problem, not mine. I was happy to help any way I could.


As a relatively recent convert to narrow gauge modeling, I well remember being a member of this publication’s target audience. Ten years ago, I had an HO standard gauge layout that was generally not succeeding. The aspect of that layout I enjoyed the most was the stone handling industrial shortline that I called Greenbrier Lime & Stone.

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This tight industrial scene was my favorite part of the Dry Fork layout

This realization was somewhat conflicting. All the tedious, overthought, deep consideration I had given the design of my layout had been guided by the teachings of Tony Koester and John Armstrong. Being an inexperienced modeler, my Dry Fork & Greenbrier layout suffered under the weight of trying to be as interesting to operate as possible. Apprehending a world “beyond the basement” through the use of hidden staging only works if the mechanical operation of the system is flawless and control is devoid of any distracting issues. I learned the hard way how important reliable operation is, and how little interest I had in extending my railroad “beyond the basement.”

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A local passes through the gaudy West Virginia mountains on my old DF&G layout

Discovering that the simple, straightforward operation of the GL&S was my favorite part of the Dry Fork layout sent me down a different path. Instead of trying to design in the most operation possible, I tried to determine the least operation my layout could have and still be interesting for the long term. The simple, spare trackplans I emailed my modeling friends during that time “looked narrow gauge” to them. I changed my guidance from the standard gauge “timetable/train order” group to the narrow gauge group. At that point, if
Guide to Narrow Gauge Modeling had been available, I would have purchased a copy. And the single part of it that would have impressed me the most would have been the illustration of the prototype Manns Creek coal loader at Clifftop, West Virginia paired with the excellent modeling of Jeff Kraker.

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Campus of Alberene Stone in the mid ’80s.

I began to consider modeling the soapstone operations of Nelson County, which were just the type of interesting, obscure, industrial subject that could make for a successful narrow gauge layout.

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Mike works a local on Brian’s On3 layout

As it happened, I was lucky enough to fall into the company of narrow gauge modelers who were interested in operation. Tom Sullivan, Brian Bond, and Steve Sherrill have become great friends who have been very patient and generous with their time and talents. Operating on their layouts convinced me that simple industrial railroads represent an excellent modeling opportunity. Since then, my narrow gauge operating crew has grown considerably. Research, construction, and operation are an ongoing source of enjoyment for all of us. The operation may be simplistic, but increased emphasis on the craft of portraying the character of the prototype more than makes up the difference in project interest.