Ryan Di Fede’s Railroad
Yesterday I visited Ryan Di Fede’s N-scale railroad in San Diego. It was the featured layout on the San Diego Division/PSR/NMRA layout tour.
Ryan established the Southern Pacific Railroad's Cascade Line N scale model railroad in 2009.
The railroad is based on Eugene, Oregon, through to the east, to the Cascade Summit. The main town on the layout is Oakridge, Oregon, which was home base to helpers for trains heading up the “Hill” to the Cascade mountains.
The railroad is prototypical to a point and with artistic license also in play.
The era for the railroad is 1954. This means that he can have anything on his railroad that is from 1954 and decades prior. No buildings, vehicles or trains on his railroad can be from any year that is later than 1954.
Ryan has traveled to Oregon and has done extensive research, including interviewing local people and railroad employees to make his layout as prototypical as possible.
The model railroad layout has a number of industries, a hotel, urban buildings and more, including lumber-based industries, furniture factory, an oil storage facility, a gas station, a restaurant, railroad station houses, an animal coral, an engine house, city buildings, a paper mill, residential houses and more.
In addition, the railroad has railroad yards, staging yards, storage yards, sidings and a wye.
The railroad is a multi-level layout and has a track elevator that moves the trains to and from each level.
Ryan also has night lighting so he can operate his trains for nighttime running.
He has a variety of trains. Some are prototypical trains and others are not.
Ryan uses Digital Command Control (DCC) & Sound for his railroad and he uses NCE Power Cabs and a phone app to run the locomotives.
The track elevator is used for both storage track and to position trains on either level of the model railroad layout.
The railroad has been made for operation sessions. His operations sessions usually have about five people, and it can take approximately two hours to complete the event. There are three engineers, one dispatcher and one elevator operator.
The model railroad layout is in Ryan's backyard inside a completely enclosed outdoor air conditioned 8-foot x12-foot storage shed.
I took these photos.
Bob Chaparro
Moderator
Model Railroads of Southern California
/g/ModelRailroadsofSoCalif
Bob Chaparro