Layout Design Process 5 - Research

Researching a prototype can be a daunting task.Fortunately for researchers today there are a number of resources. My research encompassed a multitude of sources:

Model Railroad Magazines.

Model Railroader All-Time Digital Archive THE COMPLETE COLLECTION 1934—PRESENT

Railroad Model Craftsman - have not found a CD or DVD but a web site is available with indexes for all years at Trains.com

Mainline Modeler has been released on DVD through the C&OHistorical Society.

Prototype Modeler is available online at the TrainLife.com Magazine Archive

Model Railroading magazine is available online at the TrainLife.com MagazineArchive

Railmodel Journal magazine is available online at the TrainLife.com MagazineArchive

Books and Periodicals. 

I was particularly fortunate in that during my military career I was stationed at Fort Bragg North Carolina, A few miles north of Fayetteville, home of the 82nd Airborne and the Army Special Operations Command, is North Carolina State University – and their library had an excellent periodicals section that included a full set of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman magazines, as well as trade magazines for interurban railways and logging operations.

Railroad Historical Society web sites and publications

The Great Northern Railroad Historical Society

The Northern Pacific Railway Historical Society

The Milwaukee Road Railroad Historical Society The Union Pacific Railroad Historical Society

Layout design blogs

Lance Mindheim's Model Railroad Design blog

LDSIG's Layout Design Primer.

 The Process.

I began to research prototype railroading and identified specific items of interest in each of  13 functional areas I have identified in the Reference Page section on the right side of this blog. Those items were cataloged in file folders. I’ve 20 file drawers of Xeroxed copies of articles in addition to nearly 15 years of other model magazines published in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Those 20 file drawers and numerous books and magazines produced too many ideas for my railroad modeling. To aid in the refinement process I used Dave Clemons' development problem solving process. The next blog will discuss that problem solving process of defining and redefining the objective at hand, in this case moving from a broad idea to fine tuning the process (in this case layout design) to those final elements that can be reasonably represented on the layout.