John Armstrong (model Railroader) - Model Railroad Construction

Model Railroad Construction

In evenings and on weekends he began building his Canandaigua Southern Railroad O scale layout in the basement of the modest Armstrong family home, carefully cutting the cross-ties from balsa wood, setting them on rail-beds made from scale-sized gravel, and then laying out each length of track and carefully nailing it into place with tiny railroad spikes to scale that were hammered into the cross-ties one at a time.

By the time of his death, according to one account, Armstrong had hand-laid more than three real miles of O-scale track on waist-high platforms that bounded a narrow passageway spiraling outward from the foot of the basement steps. Armstrong's son, John P. Armstrong, has said however that he does not think it came to more than 500 real yards of track, but admits he is not sure.

Armstrong's layout grew to become one of the most influential model railroad layouts in the United States and attracted visitors from all over the world.

Alongside and behind the tracks, Armstrong reconstructed the entire landscape of his childhood in upstate New York. Locomotives and rail cars of the Canandaigua Southern Railroad, all built from scratch, rolled alongside rivers, plains and hillsides—all to scale and covered with hand-made stone, grass and trees—and through complete small towns as they were in a time when the railroad was so exotic that it would fire any child's imagination.

Cattaraugus Yard, the switching yard in the far corner of the basement—with its dozen or more tracks that crisscrossed and forked and merged past station houses, power poles, a water tower, signal lights, and beneath a six-story coaling tower, and then into and out of the turntable at the center of the yard that allowed incoming locomotives to be turned around and sent back the other way—was as enthralling to many young visitors as manned space flight.

To reach the switching yard, visitors had to walk the spiraling passageway through the miniature landscape that expanded the basement to enormous size—a landscape filled with railroad stations; houses; bridges; factories; a cliff-side gravel road that ran under a concrete arch supporting a steel railroad bridge in front of a hydroelectric dam with a generating plant beside it topped with twin round chimneys and, above and behind it on a plateau, a solitary white two-story wood frame house; railroad crossings; shacks; coal companies; a three-story brick 'Central Light And Power Company' with a brick smoke stack that dwarfed it, cars loaded with coal from the 'Ynysybwl Coal Company' waiting out front, and high-tension power lines running up the mountainside behind; small town streets lined with banks and stores; and even a careful and detailed reconstruction of the diner in Edward Hopper's famous painting Nighthawks, complete with customers, nested up against a two-story beige brick building that had beside it an equally tall red brick building, upon the wall of which was mounted a billboard for an 'East End Hardware' store with their slogan 'Nuts To You!'.