Layout Concept Overview

In Layout Design Process 4 - Railroad Modeling I identified that the layout design process can be broken down into three primary functional areas: Concept, Structure, and Layout Detail.

Concept identifies the: Who, What, Where, and When aspects of the layout development process. It is broken down into two main element:

1. Your prototype railroad interests that you wish to model.
2. Your specific modeling interests.

At the end of the concept phase you should have a 5 second ‘overview' of your layout and a larger 'theme‘ document to refer to in the track planning process.

Prototype Railroad Interests

This element consists of four parts:

1. The Location (or locale) to be modeled.
2. The Era to be modeled.
3. The Class (or size) of railroad to be modeled.
4. The Type of railroad to be modeled.

Specific Modeling Interests.

This element consists of six parts:

1. The extent of railroad operations that the modeler wishes to replicate, Railroad operations consists of: passenger, freight, yard, interchange and maintenance of way operations.
2. The industries the modeler wishes to replicate. This includes heavy industry, light industry and miscelaneous . 
3. The traffic the modeler wishes to replicate. This includes train frequency (the numbers of trains to be run, diversity of train consists (the mix of business that determines the equipment and motive power requirements.
   
4. The locomotives of interest to the modeler.
5. The rolling stock of interest to the modeler.
6. The type of railroad personnel positions the modeler wants to simulate during layout operations.

In the next several blogs I will discuss the thought process I used to determine my specific prototype and modeling interests.