Welcome to Bob Batson's  TEXAS CENTRAL RAILROAD Home Page    The TC is a freelanced, N scale (1/160), model railroad depicting rural Central Texas between Fort Worth and Austin. It is designed to be an operations-oriented layout, with semi-serious operating sessions.  It reached its first stage of completion in 1994.  Since then,  several track revisions have been made and some structures and details have been added.  It has appeared in N SCALE MAGAZINE (www.nscalemagazine.com) four times.

The layout fills most of a two-car enclosed garage, and features award-winning scratch-built structures, over 1,000 trees, various rural towns, and one large city. The TC is  patterned after the Southern Pacific in Central Texas.  I am also fond of the Missouri Pacific.  It's real life home is Lubbock, Texas.

I use the Planned Railroad Routing computer program to generate train switchlists.  Walkaround throttles (GML with memory and Aristocraft radio control) with block control are used. We can run six trains at the same time; two on the mainline and local control at Brazos, Lott, Busich, and Rutledge.  Over 250 cars are moved during each operating session, plus two passenger trains and unit reefer, coal and tank trains.

I made it a serious goal to be on the cutting edge of technology when I started building  my layout.   It is unbelievable what technological advances have taken place since the mid 90's!   At the time I began to seriously  work on my layout, DCC was not an option.  I expect if I were starting today, I would take advantage of it, but I have too much invested in what I have and  too many engines to consider adding 'chips' to each of them.  ALSO, code 55 track was not an option then,  and I just don't see replacing it all  at this point.  It makes me sick to even think about it!  Track laying is not my idea of fun.

As you have time, check out the layout map (linked below).   By clicking on each town on the map, you will find an article about that town and captions for photos at the bottom.  Click on the thumbnails to see the larger photos.  Enjoy the tour!   

 Let me know what you think!  (click here to respond)