The Los Angeles Terminal Railroad

[cnw1961]

Last week I realized that I had not worked on my layout for about 2 1/2 months and though I wanted to do some modeling, there was nothing I would like to do on that layout. So I decided that it was not the right layout for me and spontaneously tore it down. A while ago I had seen some old pics showing Palmetto Street in LA and I realized it has all I want from a layout: urban, a real location, lots of structures and street trackage. Doing a trackplan was quite easy and I only had to tweak Palmetto Street a bit here and there to make it suitable for my layout.





After building mock-ups for all the structures I knew that I wanted to build this layout, because it has all that I missed in my previous layouts: a tight urban location, lots of big (different) structures and street trackage. So I started building it right away ...

It has been a long time since the last train ran on Palmetto Street and most tracks in the Patch have been removed. I want to build a modern era layout and so I thought that if some customers in downtown LA were still served by rail, it would be most likely that a shortline was doing the job nowadays. So here is the story of my freelance shortline: The Los Angeles Terminal Railroadoperates a few miles of track in Downton LA. They took over the switching district known as "The Patch" from ATSF when it was no longer profitable for the big carrier to serve the few customers left. Though it lived through hard times, the LA Terminal managed to survive and now (2003) the times are changing for the better. Tracks in the Patch are being rebuilt and the number of custumers of the LAT is increasing. The LAT even purchased a second engine recently, a MP15DC that will help their aged SW9 doing the job.