Owner Inspiration and Techniques on the Hooch Junction

Your Hooch Junction railroad runs from the West Virginia mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. How did you come up with that name and that route? Okay, well, Hooch Junction came from my days in Southeast Asia, where we referred to shacks, shanties, and other outbuildings and dwellings as hooches. And when I got back to the States, my railroad ended up in a little outbuilding in the rear of the house that everybody referred to as the hooch. So as I developed the railroad in this building, it became Hooch Junction, and it's just been Hooch Junction ever since. But what about the route? The route is something that you tend to model what you see and what you know about. Growing up in Washington, I used to see trains at the grade crossings. When I first started driving, that's when I first started paying attention to trains. When I went away to school, you started paying attention to trains. Now we're back to these girls. Being in Hampton, lot of the girls that went to-- Hampton, Virginia? Hampton, Virginia, were from surrounding areas in Virginia, so as you start dating these girls, and of course, there were only three or four cars on the campus, so you have plenty of dates. I find myself running these Virginia roads and West Virginia roads and Carolina roads, all these places that the N&W and the C&O went. Okay. And as a result, you started noticing, well, this train goes here, and this train goes here, but then you kind of get fascinated with a area, a geographical area, that they covered. And as a result, you just tend to model things that you see or things that you've been exposed to as things that you know. Okay. Is coal the main reason for the railroad's existence? Coal was pretty much the main reason. However, the railroad does have a number of functions. It moves a lot of coal, but we've also developed a steel industry. We have a lumber industry. All three of these industries serve each other and generate traffic for some 75 other industries that are on line. And the reason I can't nail down a timeframe, I don't have the discipline. Okay, so you'd say modern? Would you say modern? Yeah, I'd say modern. I started out in the sixties, because I recognized trains from the sixties. Okay. Or late fifties, but the steam was pretty much gone. Yes. And I remember seeing GP7s and GP9s, and E8s and E9s, and I remember these things evolving to wherever they are now. And as I started modeling, I said, "I remember that. "I'll buy one of those." Okay. Then as time goes on, I keep updating with whatever. So I started out and I'm still, I'm going as far as time will go. Your layout is freelanced with the Norfolk and Western and Chesapeake and Ohio mainlines. Right. You have two separate, main lines on the railroad. They go out throughout the whole, whole railroad. Why do you do that? Is that something you've kind of got an idea on that from the Reid Brothers' Cumberland Valley system? They have that. Or did you just come up with it yourself? Well, I came up with it, I'm gonna go back to Reid Brothers. I came up with it myself. Basically, once again, it's what you see. Being in school in Hampton, Virginia, milepost zero, the C&O. Right across the water, terminus for the N&W. The starting points of both of these railroads. And by seeing them constantly, you say, well, you do both of them, and both of them start relatively in the same place. And we were talking five, six miles apart. They're partially responsible for all of this stuff, because-- The Reid Brothers. The Reid Brothers, 'cause what I got from them is that you can build a big layout in N scale. And they've kind of turned the tide on modeling, because until then, nobody really paid a lot of attention to it. But with their workmanship and their attention to detail, it showed that you don't have to have a pipe dream about this thing, that it's actually something that's possible for a human to accomplish, if they just go and try In his lifetime. In his lifetime, right. A lot of people worry about detail, and I don't really consider this layout to have any detail on it. It has got various levels of completion, but it's not a detailed layout. It's not like George or Joe Sileo has a Dick L well, or even interior buildings like a Dean Freytag. But if you look at the big picture, it looks complete and finished and polished. And, and that's my mindset. If I can get it look right at three foot, I'm good. Does too much track hurt the spatial advantages of N scale? That is where the effect you're trying to create. It could. As in all layouts, if you get your ratio track to scenery where it doesn't look right, or it looks crowded, or it looks overbearing with track, then you kind of lose the effect. Yeah. I've got a lot of track in various areas, but those are yards. I mean, yards are eight to 10 tracks wide, and that looks right for a yard. N scale track often looks oversized. What do you do to fix that? Use code 80 rail, and you clean it until it gets to code 55.