Having set the scene in the last entry, let me introduce you to American houses, layouts, and Peter's railway.

When I first got started in the model railroading hobby in the USA I found that, unlike the clubs I was used to in the UK, the "standard" seemed to be for an individual with a large basement to effectively start his own club.  Having just been through the home-search process we were very aware of the differences between UK and US homes; briefly for the uninitiated: almost every home I visited in the USA had a large basement that typically contained a laundry room, a boot room of sorts and possibly a half-bath (loo).  There would also be at least two big rooms, each approaching the half the size of the house, and don't forget, American houses are significantly bigger than UK houses.  Oh, and for good measure, the walls are almost exclusively of studwork construction making it very easy to punch holes in walls for railway tracks to pass through.  

The typical pattern for a railroad group seemed to be for a homeowner to build benchwork (what we would think of as baseboards) around the walls of a room and because the rooms were large they would very often build a peninsula into the room with the railway running down one side, around the end and then back up the other.  If you want an example, think of the Fareham Club 0 Gauge layout Middleton.  The branch fiddleyard on that layout runs down the middle of the operating space, think what might be achieved if that fiddle yard was laid with 00 or N gauge track and a high backscene was put down the middle; you could easily fit a lot of interesting scenery in the space.  Anyway, when I was there the preferred method for benchwork seemed to be what they called "L Girder"; think of this as a framework with a roadbed shaped and supported on risers coming up from the frame of the benchwork.  Anyone who has looked at the underside of Soberton's main boards will recognise this construction method, the only difference being that because an American layout is "fixed" the tendency would be to make the basic frame from 2" x 1" prepared timber rather than the ply I used when we built Soberton.

Now, when I knew layout owner Peter he was living in what the Americans called a townhouse in Alexandria, in English, a terraced house.  The basement of this house was small by US standards but even so it was bigger than our front room in England, a good 25' x 12' occupying about 1/3 of the footprint of the house.  The layout didn't exactly fill the space but went a good way towards doing so; there was room to move all around it and the main operating or dispatcher desk was in the back corner of the room behind the layout with the staging area (in English: Fiddle Yard).  This area Peter referred to as Chelan Yard and was effectively the meeting point of a main east-west route on the Burlington Northern and a Northbound local line, the Colombia and Okanogan Railway (The CORy); also from Chelan there was a BN line running south to join up with another east-west line operated by another of the big  companies (possibly Union Pacific). 

From my ragged memory, the layout was built on a set of 4 boards that were each of the order of 6' x 3' .  The staging yard was on one of these, the Spur to the south on another and the main northern line on the third and fourth; the basic arrangement was not a horseshoe shape, but it was getting on for it.  

Oh, and it was N Gauge!  

I have struggled to pull all these details back from memory, but having re-read them they are reasonably good description of the layout, unfortunately I don't have any photos or sketches and Peter hadn't created a website for the line.  What I do remember clearly was him telling me though was that this was the third iteration of the layout as both he and his wife worked for the US Government and they had moved around a fair bit in their lives.  At the time (mid 90s) he was expecting that they would be moving back to somewhere near the Rockies, he was a geologist and at the time there was a lot of "official" interest in the seismic activity in that area.  He then went on to say that they intended to stay in that area to retire; this would create a 4th iteration of the layout and something I found on the web late 90s/early noughties suggested he had indeed moved to a community called Brighton on the outskirts of Denver Co.   The web article I saw was in his personal webspace on AOL and it was clear that he had indeed achieve his goal of finding a permanent home for the layout.  Fortunately I had printed some of these pages out, and I have managed to locate them and scan them.  The quality isn't brilliant but attached are two scans of the two levels of the Mark 4 layout.  

Some of the names on the Mk4 layout have changed from the ones I remember on the Mk3 so  I can't give you a detailed description, what I will do though is to study the detail of the plans and in the next edition of this story I will describe how an operating session worked - which is really why we are here.

Stay safe everyone!