Jim Brewer’s Norfolk Southern Railroad
By
Brian w. Sheron

Sunday, March 21st, turned out to be a warm, first day of Spring, and about 33 members of the Potomac Division took advantage of the warm weather to visit Jim Brewer’s Norfolk Southern Railroad.

The layout depicts the Norfolk and Western Railroad (now part of the Norfolk Southern Railroad) along the Shenandoah River between Hagerstown, Maryland, and Roanoke, Virginia, in 1956, when the railroad was transitioning from steam to diesel. What Jim has actually modeled is about 80 miles of the N&W Shenandoah Valley Division between Front Royal and Waynesboro, Virginia. He has represented Roanoke and Hagerstown with eleven common staging tracks.

The first thing you notice about Jim’s layout when you descend the stairs to his basement is its size!  The layout takes up two basement rooms. One is a huge 93’ x 30.5’, and the other is 24’ x 20’, or a total of slightly over 3,300 square feet.

The layout boasts about 400 feet of mainline track, all of which is Code 100 flextrack. Turnouts are Shinohara with either manual ground throws or under-table Tortoise switch machines. The layout is powered by a Digitrax Radio Chief DCC system, with 5 control stations/boosters and both radio-controlled and tethered throttles.

One of the best parts of model railroading is interaction and friendships with other model railroaders. Jim subscribes to this and regularly gets together with a number of his friends who help him not only operate the large railroad, but also help him build it. A substantial portion of Jim’s layout is finely scenicked, a testament to Jim and his crew’s handiwork.

Jim is the former editor of “The Arrow”, the official publication of the N&W Historical Society, and like a true historian, he has taken numerous trips to the Shenandoah Valley to collect data on recognizable structures that were present in the 1956 time frame. From this research, he has built high quality reproductions of these buildings on his layout to accurately reproduce entire streets in towns through which the railroad passed. More pictures of Jim’s magnificent layout can be found on the “Prior Layout Tours” page of the Potomac Division’s web site (http://home.comcast.net/~Potomac_NMRA/).    


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Jalbum 8.2