North Portage Mk.II

Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette recently had a cover painting showing a scene on the Huntsville and Lake of Bays Railway . Reading more about the prototype I found that this could serve as a wonderful prototype for a small beginner's layout or diorama. While the prototype ran on 3'6" gauge I used HOn3 for this plan. The wonderful thing about the prototype is that it used short trains, consisting of a boxcar and two passenger cars being pulled by two Porters. The railroad's initial equipment consisted of three 22' flatcars, two boxcars, two coaches and a portable crane.

Layout Data
Size:	1.2m x 0.25m ( 4' x 10" )
Scale:	HOn3
Turnouts:	#4
Download Plan / View PDF

The plan is a slight variation of the prototype situation at North Portage. The train arrives from the staging area, engine first, and backs into the transfer tracks to the right, where passengers transfer to the steamers. Freight cars are set out and picked up from the freight siding (in the left center) for loading and unloading from barges. And finally the train leaves again back to South Portage.

The track lengths are sufficient for two 30' passenger cars and one 22' freight car. A small saddle tank engine, based on an re-gauged Bachmann 0-4-0 Docksider would be right engine for this operation.

With three turnouts, seven feet of flextrack, three to five pieces of rolling stock and one engine this plan could serve as a first introduction to the great world of narrow gauge modeling or a nice showpiece to take to a convention. If you want to, you could add a sector plate behind the backdrop in order to have more storage capacity.

Also this plan could serve as a base into a new scale / gauge combination. Eg. the Bachmann On30 Porters are close to the prototype or HO gauge mechanisms could be used for a S scale version.

Note: This is the improved H0n3 version of an older plan. The original HOn30 version, that used Tillig turnouts, is still available for download.