• Pokey 3.0 - Construction

• Pokey 3.0 Trackplan & Operations

• N&W Pocahontas District: Last Hurrah!

• N&W Pocahontas District: Scenery Phase III

It's been a year and half since I tore down my last layout so we could move.  After a lot of remodeling work in the new house I'm glad to say that I'm finally able to begin construction on a new layout, the Pokey 3.0!

As I've done before, this will be an HO free-lanced layout, based loosely on the N&W Pocahontas District between Bluefield, W. Virginia, and Williamson, W. Virginia, era 1966, with some Appalachian mountain scenery which I love.

This blog will follow the progress of the new layout I'm planning. As with my former layout, this new layout will be a prototype freelanced layout based on the N&W Pocahontas District between Williamson, WV and Bluefield, WV. I appreciate your comments and suggestions, and look forward to having you accompany me on the journey.

Paul Krentz

Free-lancing a fictitious portion of the N&W Pocahontas "Pokey" District

Much as I hate to say this, an unexpected upcoming job change and impending move means I have to dismantle my current N&W Pocahontas layout. This layout had a much shorter life span than I was expecting. I began building it in Nov of 2014 and was hoping it would stay with me well into retirement years, but alas that will not be the case.

My last blog about the scenery on my layout grew to over 20 pages, so I figured it was time to start another post. As before, this will continue the coverage of my ongoing scenery work.

Thanks for following along!

My Pocahontas District layout models an Appalachian coal hauling railroad situated on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky. As you might guess, given the locale, I've got some mountains that need to be covered with a ton of trees. But how do you do that? I wanted a technique that would be fairly easy and quick, do so with minimal cost, but also look as realistic as possible. 

Well, it finally happened. Thanks to Bill Brillinger who came for a layout visit and put me in touch with some other local model railroaders in my area, I was able to host my first real ops session on my layout.

I've never hosted an op session before on any of my previous layouts, so this was a new experience for me. But it was definitely a great one! Dave Hamilton and Randy Nord come over and we ran trains for a little more than 2 hours.

Now that the the basic cardboard/tape scenery shell is in place on my layout, I thought it might be a good time to start a new blog on continued construction. So here we go with Phase II...

Paul Krentz

Free-lancing a fictitious portion of the N&W Pocahontas "Pokey" District

After installing some new LokSound decoders in my engines I decided it was high time to play! I set up three trains on the layout and just let 'em run around and around the mainline loop. Made me feel like a kid again, although my wife suggests I never stopped being one! (Ouch!)

Just for fun I decided to video some of the proceedings. It's nothing spectacular, but I hope it will in some small way share the fun I was having with the rest of you. 

One of the disadvantages of building an HO multi-deck layout in a smaller space is that you end up with a lot of attendant support track. On my 14' x 20' layout I have a staging yard that spans the long side of the layout and 4 separate helices. 

When I'm operating solo and switching in the yard, this support track works to my favor because it dramatically increases the length of the mainline continuous loop. If I put a train on the mainline and let it circle at prototype speeds, it passes by only once every 15 to 20 minutes of actual time.