92 Points

Rank: Track Layer

Big Reverser Key is a fictional island in the part of the South Pacific past the Cook Islands and Fiji, on the way to New Zealand, in a group of islands that may be underwater mountains in our time and place, but might have been islands without stretching the imagination too far. In this alternate history, the islands were controlled by the United Kingdom but traded to the United States as part of the “Lend-lease” arrangments ahead of WW2. Another important fictional aspect of this alternate context is a wider-spread use of locomotives and rolling stock throughout the area, to the point a giant project was undertaken to build a comprehensive locomotive and railcar maintenance, upgrade, and even research facility placed on the logistically strategic Big Reverser Key island group.

The name of the place was… Werestilthinkin TBD. As the giant depot was meant to be kept secret, a transcription that was taken too literally became part of an elaborate backstory: rather than reveal the island as part of Lend-Lease, it was made to seem the island was being bought by a reclusive Madagascarian-Albanian nobleman, Viscount Veejay von Werestilthinkin (despite the grandiosity of the back-story, there wasn’t a correspondingly grand effort made to make the story plausible) to create a nature preserve and wellness center. Whether any Axis observers noticed much of the equipment being unloaded on the island’s tiny but rapidly growing dock has been the subject of (fictional) debate. Regardless, a channel was dug and a small but full-serviced port was established.

Unique to the island’s Depot facility was a loading system that could hoist a locomotive from atop a barge all the way to the maintenance and overhaul tracks, actually lifting them over the dockside cargo handling track. This odd design was a compromise to allow for the stevadore-style loading of the rest of cargo coming too and from the island. Other innovative features of the facility was a pioneering palm-oil to super-clean diesel experimental refinery, a project intended to provide a source of low-cost fuel to rolling stock throughout the theater.

In terms of design, the layout is an extended oval with two turnouts at the right corner, the top leading into a railyard of TBD design and the bottom a branchline leading to a bridge which crosses the central water channel and comes perpendicularly across the railyard tracks, and that’s it. It’s my first layout and first fictional railroad, so best to keep the layout simple even if the lore isn’t.