Home Layout of Bill Settle

In 2000, the Santa Fe & Pacific layout was professionally photographed and was featured in the March, 2002 issue of Model Railroader.

In California, most of us have to get creative to find space to build a layout of any size. Bill's answer was to have a second story train room built above his garage. The end result was a 16 x 16 foot layout that could handle the long passenger trains of the western railroads that Bill enjoys the most. The layout featured about 4 scale miles of main line, 4 passing sidings, and a branch line. There were over 50 electrical blocks but after Bill discovered DCC and equipped many of his engines, that became the primary control method.

I had photographed the layout in 1999 and used most of the material shown here for an HTML class that I was attending and then it featured that project on the nscalestation web site. When a major layout change was made on the web site, I took it off. The Santa Fe & Pacific layout now returns to nscalestation.com along with other N scale layouts.

In 2001 the layout was dismantled when Bill and his wife moved to a new home where Bill has another creative, smaller layout that I hope to feature on this site in the future. This first section of photos show the area around the main town, passenger station, and yard. In the second section I have photos of the town of Summit and of the Grand Canyon branch line. Click HERE to go to the second section now.