I’ve never understood the layout builders who just… start. They start building without really knowing where they’ll end up. I mean, I get it. You’re excited and want to just go, but the idea of having no track plan and just building whatever comes to mind seems… wrong. I believe in the adage “Failure to plan is planning to fail.”

To each his own, I guess. (And I will admit being in awe of those who work this way and end up with amazing layouts, but I suspect most who follow this route end up with abandoned layouts.)

I need a plan, and for me to plan, I need a concept.

Luckily I’ve had one for a while, but I’d been continually tweaking it (read fighting with it) until it finally came together for good shortly before Christmas 2017.

At the highest level, the Monument City Terminal Division is based on Baltimore. From the “About the MCTD” page on this site:

So for a very long time, the concept has been that of an urban layout, based on an actual branchline and featuring a lot of industrial switching.

Problem 1: Choices

Baltimore had (and still has) lots of subdivisions to choose from, and all have elements that I would have loved to include. But you can’t have it all. Luckily, one subdivision rose above the others in terms of fondness, based on my visits there. So topping the list was the Sparrow’s Point Subdivision. It began at Bayview Yard and ended at Penn-Mary yard, which served the General Motors plant. And it was only 1.7 miles long, to boot.

Problem 2: Overcoming Mental Blocks

There was one thing that I kept fighting with. Given the layout of my room, no matter how I tried (and I tried many variants, over the course of literally years), I always ended up with the end of the branch being at the “left end” of the layout. That is, if you looked at a schematic, GM was on the left, Bayview on the right. What’s the problem you ask? For ease of operators keeping track of direction, I really wanted the convention of “left is west.” Bayview is an east-west yard, and I was having trouble reconciling the north-south nature of the branch.

Until I learned that on the B&O, away from Baltimore was always railroad west. So the branchline would have been west at the bottom (Penn-Mary) and east at top (Bayview). Problem solved! Mental block overcome! (Truth be told, anal retention overcome.)

From that realization to a workable track plan? A week. It’s on the right. (More on the industries in the plan that don’t call the prototype Sparrow’s Point Sub home later.)

To quote from a marginally-popular, little-known TV show from my youth: “I love it when a plan comes together.”