This website has been archived from TrainWeb.org/slidellnscale to TrainWeb.US/slidellnscale.
The DSA&J Railroad is a fictitious railroad with headquarters in Southeastern Louisiana. This is a freelance railroad that does not adhere to any particular time period or railroad prototype.
My fascination with trains started long time ago. When I was about 9 or 10 years old, Santa Claus brought me a Lionel 027 gauge train set for Christmas. The living room in our house was a playroom for my sister and I. There was enough space for a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood on homemade sawhorses with a simple figure 8 layout. I didn't have any buildings, trees, or mountains, but I had enough green spray paint to make grass.(spare the tissue, it gets better) But something just wasn't right. I had never seen real train tracks with 3 rails or cross ties spaced so far apart. It was still a train and I could sit for what seemed like hours watching it run around that figure 8.
Soon after, I made my first trip to a hobby shop where they had a HO layout on display. The display looked like a miniature city with trees, buildings, roads, mountains, and bridges. I was definitely hooked and that's what I wanted to build. I found a step-by-step book on how to build a HO layout and practically memorized every page. I was soon ready to pack up the old Lionel train (and yes I still have it) when I received my first HO set. I was soon busy building the empire I saw in the book. But things were about to change. My sister and I were growing up and Mom wanted furniture for the living room. There wasn't enough space in my bedroom for the train table and Mom made it clear that my bed was not going to be part of the living room decor. The train was then moved to my attic, but living in southern Louisiana it was just too hot to make a decent train room.
The idea of the train empire lay idle for years until I got married. There was a shed in the back yard and I was able to use it for my train. The 4' X 8' table soon grew to 6' X 12'. A few years later I started looking at N scale and realized that I could do almost twice as much in the same amount of space. I packed away the HO scale and started with the N scale. A few years later, we moved into our current residence that has a 2-car garage. A separate room of a house for cars is just ridiculous but for a train layout, it was perfect. The layout grew to a 17' by 12' U shape design.
Currently the layout has now grown to 20' X 14'. In January 2006 a 6' by 17' section of the table was dismantled and rebuilt into a square spiral design. A 3' by 20' section of the old layout was saved and incorporated into the new design. The section that was saved had 2 separate loops. One of the loops is an upper level that uses a 2.5 turn helix to bring the track 10" above the table to incorporate the high wooden trestle I wanted when I built the original layout. By March, most of the track had been laid and the first train was running.
For the new design, I continued with the 2 separate loops in order to have more trains continuously running. There are crossover tracks for the trains to move between loops from each direction. I am still using DC cab control for now and hope to move to DCC sometime in the near future. I made scenery blocks from wood and also used mountains as blocks to create the illusion that the layout is bigger than it is. This will also allow me to create several different scenes close together.
The table construction is just a basic box frame of 1 X 4's with 2 X 2 legs and 1/2" plywood top covered with 3/4" foam board. I tried to create a track plan on paper to get a general idea of what I wanted, but it wasn't until I started laying the track that I realized parts that would or would not work. The track plan evolved several times before I finally settled on the current design.
