The White River & Northern Mark X
“There is time. There are returns. To go is to return.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
With my grim health diagnosis came a great many changes in my modeling plans. The Black River & Western was cancelled for obvious reasons; the Newport & Rock Falls II was fully finished in record time; then this "new" layout sprouted from the remains of the decommissioned Mountain Vista Railroad, and considering the Mountain Vista sprouted from the remains of the Greystone & Rock Bottom, it's all decidedly circular—in every sense of the word.
Layout Summary
Theme: |
mountain shortline |
Setting: |
Vermont, early 1930s |
Scale: |
N |
Size: |
36" diameter |
Track: |
Railcraft Code 40 flex with some handlaid track |
Turnouts: |
handlaid Code 40 |
Min. radius: |
7" |
Max. grade: |
5% |
Control: |
two battery-powered homemade PWM throttles |
"Benchwork": |
½" Gatorfoam |
Scenery: |
Sculptamold over Gatorfoam |
Inception: |
2021 |
Status: |
~50% complete |
Disposition: |
decommissioned; split up into multiple new projects |
Yet Another Dead End
At about the halfway mark—after finishing the benchwork, laying most of the track, completing the bulk of the structures (including, of course, scads of animation and effects), indeed, after executing some of my very best modeling—I pulled the plug. I just woke up one morning, sat and stared at the layout (as it appears in the photo above) for an hour or so, and then concluded this was not where I wanted to be headed. So I grabbed a big old cross cut saw and literally sliced the layout into bits, with the intention of converting most of those bits into dioramas.
I'd even documented the hell out of everything I'd done—over sixty pages and nearly 600 images of the same old crap I've been recycling for years. Indeed, I was in the midst of updating all of those web pages and then suddenly thought, why bother? I've already done the same stuff multiple times before, and besides. So I deleted it all—probably breaking a bushel of links in the process. Oh well.
But I didn't stop there. Oh, no. I went and did it all yet again: midway through over a half-dozen new diorama projects, I threw in the towel. I donated the dioramas to various modelers, and closed up shop, pretty much for good. I came to the conclusion that I wasn't a modeler—certainly not one I'd define as such—and moved on to other hobbies.
I should probably be institutionalized...