The Mayfair Electric Story - Background
The Mayfair Electric is a mythical trolley line I am modeling in O scale. It does not attempt to model any specific prototype but rather uses familiar names from my childhood in Northeast Philadelphia. Pacific Electric was a famous trolley and interurban network in Southern California and I simply substituted the name of my neighborhood, "Mayfair", in place of "Pacific".
I am building the Mayfair Electric in my roughly 24' x 26' basement. The story of its design and construction starts many years ago.
I am a member of the East Penn Traction Club, which is a group of trolley modelers and enthusiasts based in the Philadelphia, PA region. This club pioneered the use of modular trolley layout construction and published and maintains a modular interface standard for HO and O scale. I joined this club in the late 1970's as an HO scale railroad and trolley modeler. I soon got the bug to build my own trolley modules and I was bitten by the O scale bug as well. I planned to build a small O scale demonstration layout that would feature several basic elements of model trolley layouts: End Loop on Private Right-of-Way (PRW), End Loop in Street Track, Straight Module on Private Right-of-Way, Straight Module on Street Track, and a corner Module that transitions from Private Right of Way to Street Track and provides a "cut back" loop and some storage. I completed these five modules and the layout was operational in the early 1980's. Three of the five modules were mostly finished scenery-wise and two, the PRW Loop and corner module, had no scenery at all. I had great intentions of adding to these modules but never got around to it in the 1980's and 1990's. However, during this time I did purchase two used modules from John Derr. One is a double track "wye" module which is street track for two of the legs and transitions to PRW for the third leg. The other module is a conversion module which takes the track from the PRW leg of the "wye",which is offset from the standard East Penn interface, and re-centers it.
During the 1990's, my basement experienced several floods as a result of the failure of my rain gutters and the shifting of the landscaping around my house. These floods damaged the walls of the basement and much of the materials stored on the floor. The legs of the modules were damaged but the modules themselves went unscathed. However, because of the now poor conditions in the basement the layout fell into disuse and became a storage table. At the same time my job moved from nearby Warminster, PA to Patuxent River, MD. While my family did not move and we did not sell our house, I did commute weekly the 200+ miles between my Southampton, PA home and a townhouse in Great Mills, MD. I was only home in PA for two or three days a week and there was no time for any sort of model railroading or model trolley construction. This continued for 15 years until my retirement in 2010. Returning home to PA for good my attention turned to repairing and improving my basement and building the model trolley empire I had always dreamed of.
I am building the Mayfair Electric in my roughly 24' x 26' basement. The story of its design and construction starts many years ago.
I am a member of the East Penn Traction Club, which is a group of trolley modelers and enthusiasts based in the Philadelphia, PA region. This club pioneered the use of modular trolley layout construction and published and maintains a modular interface standard for HO and O scale. I joined this club in the late 1970's as an HO scale railroad and trolley modeler. I soon got the bug to build my own trolley modules and I was bitten by the O scale bug as well. I planned to build a small O scale demonstration layout that would feature several basic elements of model trolley layouts: End Loop on Private Right-of-Way (PRW), End Loop in Street Track, Straight Module on Private Right-of-Way, Straight Module on Street Track, and a corner Module that transitions from Private Right of Way to Street Track and provides a "cut back" loop and some storage. I completed these five modules and the layout was operational in the early 1980's. Three of the five modules were mostly finished scenery-wise and two, the PRW Loop and corner module, had no scenery at all. I had great intentions of adding to these modules but never got around to it in the 1980's and 1990's. However, during this time I did purchase two used modules from John Derr. One is a double track "wye" module which is street track for two of the legs and transitions to PRW for the third leg. The other module is a conversion module which takes the track from the PRW leg of the "wye",which is offset from the standard East Penn interface, and re-centers it.
During the 1990's, my basement experienced several floods as a result of the failure of my rain gutters and the shifting of the landscaping around my house. These floods damaged the walls of the basement and much of the materials stored on the floor. The legs of the modules were damaged but the modules themselves went unscathed. However, because of the now poor conditions in the basement the layout fell into disuse and became a storage table. At the same time my job moved from nearby Warminster, PA to Patuxent River, MD. While my family did not move and we did not sell our house, I did commute weekly the 200+ miles between my Southampton, PA home and a townhouse in Great Mills, MD. I was only home in PA for two or three days a week and there was no time for any sort of model railroading or model trolley construction. This continued for 15 years until my retirement in 2010. Returning home to PA for good my attention turned to repairing and improving my basement and building the model trolley empire I had always dreamed of.