Pacific Electric Model Train Layout

In The Beginning

A long-time dream of mine has been to build the ultimate train layout, the entire USA in scale model! (No project too big to imagine tackling!) There would be something for everyone to work on! They could stay at a hotel nearby! Much better than Disneyland! But not likely to fit my barn. But it’s sure fun to think about.

Being an Angeleno, I have always thought about the Pacific Electric. The map below shows the Pacific Electric Railway in Southern California as was in 1926. I believe that at that time, the PE system was the largest electric railway in the world.

Again, not likely to fit in its entirety in the barn. Opportunely, the Pacific Electric was divided into four districts: Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric) with some additions/corrections/rearrangements:

• Northern District: San Gabriel Valley, including Pasadena, Mount Lowe, South Pasadena, Alhambra, El Monte, Covina, Duarte, Glendora, Azusa, Sierra Madre, and Monrovia.
• Eastern District: Pomona, San Bernardino, Arrowhead Springs, Riverside, Rialto and Redlands in the Inland Empire.
• Southern District: Long Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Balboa, San Pedro via Dominguez, San Pedro Via Torrance, Redondo Beach via Gardena, El Segundo, Whittier, Fullerton, Yorba Linda and Santa Ana.
• Western District: Hollywood, Glendale/Burbank, San Fernando Valley, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City, Playa Del Rey and Manhattan/Redondo/Hermosa Beaches.

As the PE was Los Angeles-centric, the four districts radiated from two stations in downtown Los Angeles: “6th and Main” and “Hill St Station / Subway Terminal”. Northern, Eastern and Southern District trains left from 6th and Main. Western District trains left from Hill St Station / Subway Terminal. I felt any model must include one of these two stations.

A natural division of the entirety of the Pacific Electric would be the Northern/Eastern/Southern Districts with the 6th and Main Station and the Western District with the Hill St Station / Subway Terminal. As I am most familiar with the Western District and because it’s smaller, I chose to model it. However, the Western District was still huge in real life. More paring down would be required.

First Model Scale Choice

Of course, what will fit in the barn is determined by how the prototype (real thing) is scaled down. By far HO is the most commonly used scale. One foot of the prototype is scaled down to 3.5 mm. There are a lot of very nice brass PE models available at a not-too-horrible cost. Before I hit upon “my crazy idea” for the layout (more later), I had been collecting HO models. I must have over a hundred.

I started drawing up a plan for the layout in Fusion 360. I worked on this for many, many months. I was drawing city blocks and streets of Los Angeles at scale. And as the centerpiece was the block with the Hill St Station / Subway Terminal. This block is bounded by Hill St on the southeast side, Olive St on the northwest side, 4th St on the northeast side and 5th St on the southwest side. Downtown LA is built at an angle.

Streetcars exiting the Hill St Station enter on Hill St and turn left towards 1st St or right towards 16th St. The streetcars run in the center of the street. For the Station to be downtown, tracks had to be placed in the existing streets. By 1925, congestion from autos was impacting PE schedules, especially to Hollywood and the Valley (there’s only one “Valley” and it’s the San Fernando Valley). So PE replaced half the Hill St Staton with the 12-story Subway Terminal Building with a subway station underneath. Streetcars exiting the Subway Terminal travel underground to where 1st St, 2nd St and Glendale Blvd meet.

The Hill St Station / Subway Terminal block is 528′ long and 324′ wide. Hill St is 86′ wide in this area. When scaled down, the block becomes, in HO-scale, 2,093mm (82.4″) by 1,134mm (44.6″). Hill St would be 301 mm (11.9″) wide. These dimensions are a significant portion of the barn. Good sense would say, scale down even more. However, I have lots of pictures of this area from the time and “scaling down even more” would make all this look like a typical model electric railroad: toy-like. So I self-imposed a constraint that downtown would have some accuracy relationship to the real thing.

Enter the Crazy Idea

After drawing a lot of streets and looking at a lot of historical pictures and thinking about the typical model electric railroad, I wondered if I could have streetcars and autos moving together. Yes, alongside each other but also behind each other. They would move in a prototypical manner. They would accelerate/decelerate smoothly, maintain speed-appropriate spacing, stop at traffic signals and make turns. Might be possible. I’ve got some ideas about how.

But now there are all kinds of new problems. Duh. If mine were a common train layout there’d be one or two trains. More than one and you need additional humans. I may have dozens of streetcars. I can’t count on having a crowd of humans available. This means the whole layout must operate autonomously. But How?

There’s the Faller Car System Digital which uses ultrasonics transmitted from the vehicles to sensors on the ceiling and radio to the vehicles to determine position and control movement. But I’m not about to drill big holes in brass models costing hundreds of dollars for the ultrasonic transmitters. They’re not in the prototypes. They’re ugly. And I would like the layout to be multilevel, for maximum use of the space, which I expect will screw up positioning. Further, the frequency of the ultrasonics is so low that I’m not sure how many vehicles can be accommodated. I dismissed the idea and came up with another idea. It’s crazy and I’m reluctant to talk about it until I get through some experiments.

And vehicles need power. Streetcars are no problem as they have power from rails or trolley wire. Autos are a problem. They’re battery-powered. But I can’t go around picking up autos and getting them charged. That’s not autonomous. I have another crazy idea for how to charge them on the fly or as a fallback, have them parallel park and charge.

And there’s the trolley pole problem. A toy model electric railway just has loops and the streetcars always use one pole and run in one direction, unless a human intervenes. In the real world, there were places where there was no loop at the end of the line. Streetcars had to reverse direction and poles had to be changed. I need to figure out how to pull down a pole on one end and put up the other.

Changing Scales

So, the plot had thickened considerably. I looked at the crazy idea problems and decided HO-scale wouldn’t cut it. HO-scale felt too small to pull off autonymous. A bigger scale seemed called for. S-scale is 1/64, O-scale 1/48. The heyday for sales of brand-new streetcar models was years ago at ridiculously reasonable prices. The only PE streetcars in a larger scale I could find were on eBay in O-scale at ridiculously exorbitant prices.

Despite knowing I would end up like Phileas Fogg, burning everything possible on his ship to reach his goal, in about 2020, I decided to go to O-scale. I’ve been working on the crazy idea problems since. As I write this I wonder if I could have used solutions for crazy idea problems in HO-scale if I had just thought more. Gulp.

And if I had not created enough work for myself, I thought I would like my O-scale layout to be what’s called Proto:48. Classic O-scale is not really to scale. The O-scale track gauge (distance between rails) is 1.25″ but should be 1.18″. The O-scale wheels are too thick, the wheel flanges too large. Take a look at the wheels beneath the freight cars below. Classic O-scale is on the left and Proto:48 is on the right.

So, okay, the difference won’t be noticeable to most people. But if building a model railroad, shouldn’t it model the railroad? Where to draw the line between obsession and practicality? Classic O-scale is easy to build and runs reliably. Where’s the challenge? Anyone can do it. Just snap the parts together. I wanted something that engaged my mind and engineering abilities. What problems could I solve while pushing the outside of the envelope?

Anyway, I now have a place for the layout; I’ve decided that I want to model, a portion of the Pacific Electric’s Western District; picked the scale and created a ton of problems for myself to solve.