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Author David Popp had a long family history of model railroading. And when he had the time and
space, he created a testament to a line in the 1959's era of Connecticut.
David: My dad was very much into model trains, and growing up some of my earliest memories are being
in the basement with him as he was working on his HO scale layout. My grandfather was also very much
into model trains; I have been around mol trains my whole life. It is just what I do for fun.
Pretty much my layout is modeled after the New Haven's Line along the Naugatuck River in
Connecticut. I have set it in the year 1959. Part of the reason that I modeled this particular line
is that it is very rich in history, in industrial history, and railroad history, and also it doesn't
hurt to have an actual prototype to go back to when you are looking for well, information on
well, how does this industry work. I he got a location, I have got a place in the world that I
can go look and find out; OK, well this is the type of traffic it had; these are the types of
passenger trains that they ran. When I first came to Model Railroader, I was living in a small
apartment, and so there was no room for my big HO layout that I had had previously when I was
teaching. So that all had to be torn down and put away. I wanted to keep model railroading so what I
did was designed a small model railroad that could fit in a small apartment easily enough, but yet
could be stacked up into a closet so that it was out of the way during normal apartment use. I
started the idea of writing a series of articles on how to build a layout in your apartment, and
still get your security deposit back; which was kind of the theme for it. Once we had built the
house, that little layout was finished, I had written several articles about it and I thought
"Oh" it is time to move on to something else. Well the little layout kept hanging around, and I just
kept coming up with ideas on how to expand it and make it bigger and so I started building it in
sections basically. The layout is currently broken into about 5 sections because there are individual
zones of where the work has occurred. This is the primary section, the first piece. It took about a
year to build it from start to finish. This has got some of the more bucolic kind of
the Connecticut scenes to it. The little street area is one of my favorites with the little shop
fronts, and the different people and details and things. I had an N scale layout back when I was a
kid in the 1970's, and N scale was in it's infancy then so there wasn't a lot available for it, nor
did the equipment run very well. But coming back to it in 2002 when I started the layout I was
amazed at all of the wealth of details of different figures and vehicles, and all of that
that was available. It has made modeling very enjoyable. While there are a lot of materials that
are commercially available sometimes you have to build your own too. The rowboat over there in the
river over there for example with the guy fishing out of it that was modeled out of a boat that my
grandfather had years ago. It was a wood boat, and I just cobbled it together with small pieces of
styrene and than painted it to look like his boat so you can make them too. Section 2 connecting to
section 1 has a nice industrial area for the town on that side, but more importantly it has got a
staging yard on the backside, d that is where trains come and go off of the railroad. Next to
that is section 3 which is this piece right here, and this includes Waterbury which is the hub of
the railroad. So during an operating session trains will come up the rail line, they will come
into Waterbury, and they will broken apart into smaller trains, and then sent out to go switch the
industries back down the line and than north and other locations. And than all of the passenger
trains too come into Waterbury and most of them turn around and go back out. So it is really a key
point. And in addition to Waterbury this piece here really counts as section 4. It is not very
big compared to the rest of the railroad, but it has got some very industries. In particular, this
is the Waterbury Gas Works is a key industry in the town of Waterbury at the particular time that
I am modeling. This is the newest section. This is a branch line which runs all of the way from
Waterbury all of the way north to the town of Winston, Connecticut, and that is where the
railroad terminated there. The buildings on this section for the most part are for the most part
fictitious. They look New England, and the industries are names after real industries on the
railroad, but for the most part the buildings are put together with kit bashing where you take
several different kits and cut the pieces together and make something completely new out of them. A
few buildings on here are close to what their prototypes should look like. The Torrington
Station which I am standing next to here is a rough facsimile of what the Torrington Station
really looks like. This section is finished well enough to be operated, so when my operating crew
comes over to run trains, you know, things look reasonably finished. But there trees that need to
be filled in on the hillside here. There is a whole industry here that is missing from this
corner. There should be a cement plant there. have parking lots and things that don't have the
scenery work done on them yet, and I have whole buildings that are still in raw plastic that that
need to be painted and weathered. So this is it. This is the entire Naugatuck Valley as it stands
in its 5 sections at the moment, and that is the beauty of N scale is because we can fit all of
this stuff in, and I still have plenty of room in the rest of my basement to add more. So we can
keep going if we need to. In hindsight building the layout in sections or piece by piece is really
a wonderful way to get started in the hobby. You've got the enjoyment of I am just working in a
small section so I can try things out, and if it doesn't work out too well I can take it out and I
can replace it. But the other thing is that you can have a microcosm to hone all your skills in
before you start working on a bigger railroad. So working in small pieces, but having an idea of
where you can grow it to make it larger and larger is really a smart way to do it. So if I had it to
do over again; this is the way I would have started.