And Then There Were None: Long Live Dunes Junction! Long Live Old Line Corridor!

Just like that, the Dunes Junction and the Old Line Corridor layouts are gone.

Our house is getting a new family, renters with young children from overseas who are coming to Washington for medical training for a year. We’ve spent the past few weekends decluttering and clearing out the place for our new guests. Among the personal junk that needed to go were the Dunes Junction and Old Line Corridor layouts. 

We knew the layouts would need to be disposed of back in March, so I started making inquiries among model railroad network, and you like likely read about it here on the blog. I sought the advice of a few of our old heads in the Washington DC modeling community, who to a man wished me luck and told me to prepare to take a bath recovering layout building expenses. 

One option was to transport the layouts to our new home in Delaware. Realistically, we could really only accommodate one of those layouts, but after much soul-searching, I decided that any model railroading I would do in Delaware would be a clean sheet, all new project. I’m already plotting a modular European prototype project either N scale or possibly HO narrow gauge. Look for a future post on this topic. 

Dunes Junction getting ready to ride to Michigan. It stood up well to man-handling off its shelf brackets and into Greg’s car.

The announcement to my network didn’t yield the quick sale I had hoped for. I formed a backup plan to donate the layouts to clubs that had expressed interest in accepting them. A module group had its eye on the Dunes Junction for incorporation into its collection of show modules. An N-focused group thought it might be able to use the Old Line Corridor as either an exhibition layout or as salvage for its trees, structures, and catenary poles.

Ebay did the trick to motivate some buyers who had been lurking in this blog and on the Facebook groups to which I had been posting.

Dunes Junction sold first, to Greg, a modeler from Michigan. He was very excited to receive the layout, and he did a two-day road trip to come pick it up. He drove straight back with it and sent me pictures of it temporarily set up in his train room, complete with some of his own South Shore equipment running on it!

Dunes Junction in its new home, complete
with South Shore rolling stock.

A week or so later, I sold the Old Line Corridor to Ryan Thoman, one of the owners of White Rose Hobbies in York, Pennsylvania. I was thrilled to learn that the OLC’s new home would be a public display at a hobby shop! A back-of-mind ambition for OLC had been exhibition, UK-style, and it pleases me immensely to know that kids and aspiring model railroaders will be able to enjoy and take inspiration from the layout. Ryan is a veteran of the Norfolk Southern on the Keystone and Northeast Corridors, and he looked forward to having an N scale re-creation of his former professional stomping grounds. 

The Old Line Corridor loaded up and ready for transport to White Rose Hobbies in York, PA.

York is a couple of hours away, and Ryan wasted no time in putting the OLC back to work. In less than 24 hours, NS and Amtrak trains were rolling through the OLC on White Rose Hobbies’ YouTube channel. It was truly a thrill to see the layout in action on line!

I expected to somewhat sadder about the departure of these two layouts than I actually was. I’m already thinking through the possibilities for my next model railroad project, which is likely to be N scale modules depicting European or possibly Northern Indiana prototypes. Watch this space…