Adventures in Designing a Model Railroad

For a while now, I've been designing an N-scale model railroad in my office. At first, I started big:

Top level

Bottom level

They say when building a model railroad, you need to start with your goals - what you want from the railroad. For me, these were my goals (in descending order from most important to least):

I wanted something that goes round-and-round as a form of kinetic energy in the office, without needing to think about it . I don't care so much about switching or getting cars where they need to go; making things go roundy-round is enough for me

I wanted to have a variety of different trains to look at. This means I want to be able to run passenger trains and other trains with very long cars (such as autoracks, which are long cars that carry automobiles)

I'm renting, so I wanted something that can easily come apart during a move - and ideally be able to put it back together again in a new space

I wanted at least 1 of the sections to be something I can take to train shows and demonstrate (potentially as part of a club)

I didn't want to focus on making something "realistic"; I wanted to use the trains as an excuse to make dioramas of my interests and hobbies even if a train would never go through there IRL

Since one of my hobbies is tech, I wanted to be able to program the trains and run them from a computer script

The design was to be broken up into several key areas. Starting in the bottom left and going clockwise around the room:

Big Thunder

Near the left entrance to the room, I wanted to have something that involved my favorite ride at Disneyland: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

The plan was to have an area which had a storage area for narrow-gauge trains around a big mountain. These narrow-gauge trains would run up along the left side of the room to service an area near the top-left of the room (more on that later).

Then there would be standard-gauge trains going up and around on the outside. The center of the mountain would actually hide a helix that took trains from the upper deck to the lower deck (and vice versa).

These standard-gauge trains would also stop at a mine of some kind - because it wouldn't be Big Thunder without a mine.

Badlands

I currently work as a video game developer at my day job.

The first time I decided to make my own stuff for video games was back when I was 12 years old, making custom levels for Halo: Custom Edition on the PC.

I toyed with having a Halo section, but even though I didn't care that much about realism having an explicitly sci-fi area was a bit much, even for me.

So I instead focused on the second time I ever made my own stuff in a video game: making custom maps for Team Fortress 2.

Note the railroad tracks on the left side of the image

Team Fortress 2 is a shooter game themed to 1960s-era spy movies, two things that feature heavily in their maps are trains and rockets. I was thinking it would be cool to create a space where trains stop to service a rocket that was fueling up.

The aesthetics blend well with Big Thunder Mountain next to it, and in the background I was going to have my narrow-gauge trains moving back and forth on their way to...

The Rivers of Adventure

Before I worked at my current job, I actually worked at Disneyland on the World-Famous Jungle Cruise. Big Thunder Mountain may be my favorite ride to ride, but the Jungle Cruise is the favorite ride in my heart.

Skipper Jay

In the top-left of the room, I wanted to have a Jungle Cruise area. This was actually the first thing I wanted to make on the railroad and sort of the genesis of the whole concept.

You see, when they were planning to build Indiana Jones at Disneyland, they originally had a much bigger scope. Rather than it being "just a jeep ride", instead it was going to meld multiple attractions into a single experience.

The jeep ride was still there, of course, but also there would be a minecart rollercoaster (later built at Disneyland Paris) - and the existing Disneyland Railroad and Jungle Cruise would go right through the same show building:

Look closely and you can see the jeeps, the Jungle Cruise, the minecart coaster, and the Disneyland Railroad all in this image

I really enjoyed the idea of all these things coming together. (In practice, it would've been an operational nightmare... but it's a cool idea!) So I wanted to pay homage to that and have a section of my model railroad be dedicated to this idea.

There would be a big temple, and the train would run right through it. On the outside, there's a jeep depot for jeeps being dispatched into the temple. Below the jeep depot, Jungle Cruise boats would go through the river. And finally - that narrow-gauge train that goes down to Big Thunder Mountain would have a stop up here near the temple, loading up valuable artifacts and sending them... somewhere, I'm sure.

I wanted this to be one of the modules I could take with me to shows, so the original plans had that in mind. However, it turns out that the corner is the wrong way around (it's an inside corner - I need it to be an outside corner for it to work at shows), so I had to come up with a backup plan.

I really wanted to bring these pieces of concept art to life. I even wanted to have that radio tower in the background connect to the theme of the next module...

Goldenrod City

Goldenrod City is an area from the Pokemon games, specifically Gold/Silver/Crystal.

Pokemon was the first "real" (non-educational) game I got to play seriously growing up; my dad thought video games were too violent so I never got to experience them as a young kid. I would beg and beg and beg him to let me play Pokemon and the answer was always "no, it's too violent"... up until the day when I got gifted a Game Boy Advance and a copy of Pokemon Ruby for Christmas. Together, they ignited my love for gaming.

I chose Goldenrod City for a couple reasons:

First - it has a big radio tower in it that I could easily transition into the concept art for the Jungle Cruise section of the layout.

Second - there's already a train that runs through it in the games!

Note the radio tower - controlled by Team Rocket! - and the elevated train station next door

I wanted to celebrate my love for Pokemon by doing a faithful recreation of Goldenrod City. I wanted to have the train run all the way through on that elevated rail, and I wanted to have the Goldenrod Radio tower as a prominent feature.

This section was originally designed to be my "traveling module" I could take to shows (since I couldn't take the Jungle Cruise section), so the plans have it built to the NTRAK specs.

The Workspace

As I mentioned, this is also my office. I need to work in here! So I wanted to have a lightly-themed area where I could do my day job, and I also needed a spot to work on the trains. So the top-right corner of the room never really got a theme, other than "I guess this is where I work", haha.

The trains would then run behind my desk to the last section:

Discovery Bay

I made my own maps for Team Fortress 2 for a while. But I went to college and for an elective I took a class on the Java programming language. I never really wanted to become a programmer (I was an English major!), but a friend of mine I met on Team Fortress encouraged me to at least take one class and see if I liked it, since I was fairly competent in computers already.

And sure enough - I did like it! I got a D in the class, but I learned the basic concepts and wanted to make my own stuff after. My friend encouraged me to maybe make my own games, so I picked up Unity since C# was very close to the Java language I had just learned.

The first game I wanted to make was a steampunk RTS game, which I called "Schemepunk" (that name is my magnum opus). I never really got anything playable, but it turned my love for making things on other people's games into a love for making and developing my own games.

So naturally I really wanted to have a steampunk section on my model railroad! Combine that with my love for Disney, and the fact that Disneyland has a never-built steampunk land called Discovery Bay:

I didn't want to necessarily follow the plans here directly - moreso, I wanted to use the aesthetics of the area to fill in the gaps as I made a celebration of the thing that got me making video games to begin with.

Going Down

There would be 2 helices in this plan - one underneath Discovery Bay, and a second underneath Big Thunder Mountain. The bottom side would be a storage area for the trains - I have kitty cats, and they love to knock over things.

I wanted an area where I could store the trains free of worrying about tiny paws knocking everything over. So it made sense to make the bottom level entirely composed of train storage, with the ability to use a computer to throw the switches and dispatch trains onto the main line.

Hitting Reality

So I started working on this big thing, and I quickly realized a couple things:

First: I needed somewhere to be able to put things down in my office. Everything being covered in railroad tracks meant I couldn't

Second: This was actually a lot harder than it seemed in my head, and lines on paper actually look really crowded when you put them into practice

So over the next few years, I scoped down as I dealt with the reality of what I was making.

Here's the plans as they stand today:

Top level

Bottom level

As you can see, they're a bit smaller than the original plans. A few of the changes:

Bye-Bye Badlands

As fun as the concept of having an area based around Team Fortress 2 was, I needed to have somewhere to actually use my office as a room - which meant one module had to go.

The one I was least attached to was the Team Fortress 2 Badlands section, so sadly that was the one that got cut.

The New Bay

In the place where the Badlands were, I moved Discovery Bay. This also gave me the chance to expand it out a bit - I'm sticking a bit closer to the concept art this time. Shout-out to Jason over at Parkendium for giving me much better concept art rather than the tiny JPEGs I had at the start of this process!

(One change I've made since that post is the addition of a "car float" that takes train cars across rivers... except mine is an "airship float" that'll take the cars downwind instead!)

I also decided to make Discovery Bay my traveling module, and build it to the NTRAK 2000 specs (which is what my local train club uses instead of the standard NTRAK specs). This is largely because of changes I had to make to Goldenrod itself:

Shrinking Goldenrod

Without that big balloon corner in the bottom-right of the room (the former location of Discovery Bay), I needed a new place to turn trains around.

Since I also wanted to run big, wide passenger cars... that meant that I couldn't do sharp corners, since the trains would derail. So I needed a little bit of a balloon on the Goldenrod Module in order to bring the trains out a little bit more such that they could be turned around.

I still wanted to be able to bring a little piece of Goldenrod with me, though. So since the entire module couldn't be built to the NTRAK specs, I instead went with the smaller standard: T-TRAK, which is roughly 1 foot square.

The actual city itself has been shrunk a bit to match (which does sadly mean losing some details), but at the very least I'll be able to travel with it still.

Under Construction

Construction has been a bit hit or miss.

It's no secret that working in games can be overwhelming at times. In early 2023, I got hit with my first layoff in the industry. I got a second layoff in 2024, and a third in early 2025. As of August, I have worked on 5 different projects in the last 5 years.

Each time I managed to survive and get moved to a new team, but each time I've also been worn down just a little bit more.

Each time I got laid off, I only made it to a new team because someone on my prior team recommended me and fought hard to make sure I didn't lose my job entirely.

But then I wind up on a new team, and each time I feel like I have to prove myself to this new team again - just so I can have an advocate if we get hit with one more layoff.

Not to mention that as people get laid off, teams get smaller and smaller and the pressure builds to "go, go, go!" and make sure we have something we can show... or else.

So I've been tired. Things were swimming along for a bit, but over the last few years they've really stalled out as I simply don't have the energy to engage in my passions.

That's one reason why I'm writing this post - I want to have some documentation somewhere to hold me accountable, because by golly I want to bring Discovery Bay to a show this Christmas come hell or high water!

I can't guarantee that this'll be a model railroad blog or anything (it probably won't, to be honest). I'll probably chat about other stuff from time to time. But I do plan to at least talk a bit about the journey to bring Discovery Bay to a show this Christmas, and I've taken the next 2 weeks off of work to try and recuperate a little bit.

So stay tuned!