The Dolton Industrial Park was a 6 square feet HO scale model railroad switching layout module designed for operation, representing the Dolton, Illinois area.
Introduction
This layout was 6 feet long and 1 foot deep and used a number of buildings and the best rollingstock from the dismantled CSFT layout, and some of the industries from Chatham, which was also dismantled around the same time as the CSFT. The CSFT layout, at it’s largest, required a space about 20 x 10 feet. All the turnouts and all the buildings on the Dolton layout were sourced from either the CSFT or Chatham layouts, the only thing needed to be purchased was some lengths of flexi-track.
You can also see photo albums of the layout in the Photo Galleries .
An aerial photo / track plan of the Dolton, Illinook and Blue Island modules together can be found here.
Why?
You may wonder why I would dismantle the CSFT and Chatham, which between them covered 58 square feet, in favor of having a 6 square feet layout. In March and April 2011 I was becoming increasingly concerned about the condition of the garage which housed those 3 layouts, and the seemingly increasing possibility of not being able to have the available space to house them prompted me to design a smaller (initially 12 x 2 feet) layout, based on the Gumstump and Snowshoe concept. During this design phase, the garage sprung a leak in its roof directly above the CSFT which caused some water damage to the layout. This confirmed my worst fears about the condition of the garage, and I was almost ready to give up having a layout at all. Then my wife came to the rescue and suggested I have a smaller layout inside the house. So the concept for the Dolton Industrial Park was born.