David lives in Bath England, and models highly detailed scenes based on his home town of Waynesboro PA.  Read on to hear David's story, and enjoy WM modeling with an international flavor.

Welcome to Waynesboro, PA!

Waynesboro, PA is a 3D snapshot of where West Main Street crosses the Western Maryland Railway in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania in the eastern United States of America in the Cumberland Valley of the Appalachian Mountains.

Why Waynesboro, PA?  It's home.

It's where my grandfather was born in 1867, my father in 1905 and where I last lived in America back in 1963. So if Americans are permitted to have ancestral homes, Waynesboro is mine. My ancestors were there from the 1740s.

Why call it a snapshot? I love researching and modeling buildings. In some ways the track is almost incidental. But the location of where a railroad crosses a road becomes a special place. People have to wait when a train comes through. It's a natural place for the railway depot which in its turn becomes a gateway to the town for those arriving and a gateway to the wider world for those about to board a train - a place where mystery and apprehension combine in anticipation. It's a place where people congregate. In earlier years it's where the news from the outside world would have been received on the railway depot's telegraph.

In Waynesboro the Western Maryland (WM) passenger depot also housed the Railway Express Agency depot.

My father was one of 14 children. They earned their pocket money by raising goldfish in one of the mill ponds of my grandfather's flour mill and shipping the goldfish via Railway Express to east coast branches of Woolworth's. The depot model stirred my late father's memory and gave me the treasure of this wonderful story.

The WM freight depot model led to another reminiscence by my father: the open door is where he backed up his father's chain drive truck to pick up Kaffer corn, shipped in by train from AG Scarlett’s in Baltimore, to add to the chicken feed prepared at the mill, McLaughlin's Hopewell Roller Mill out at Roadside, just to the northeast of Waynesboro. The second passenger depot (on the north side of West Main Street) was the Cumberland Valley (CV) Railroad depot, later taken over by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The roundhouse behind the depot was built by the CV's predecessor, the Mont Alto Railroad which had linked the iron ore smelting operations of Mont Alto to Waynesboro. Short-lived, the roundhouse was torn down beginning on the morning of November 5, 1903 having been unused for some years.

 The '3D snapshot' features all scratchbuilt buildings based on a large number of old and new photographs, measured drawings and Sanborn insurance maps.

As to the era - well - if there was a building or structure at any time I've modeled it. So maybe the era modeled is in the future when this preservation record is re-assembled on site for real and not just in model form!

I get a real buzz from tracking down old photographs and maps to further my model building. A good example is the Waynesboro Railway Express Agency depot. In this case I only had one 1962 photo showing the south elevation of the depot and, in the mid-distance, what I then knew as a gas station. It took me about eight years to find the remaining series of photos (some dating back to the early 1900s). These enabled me to understand what the depot had looked like originally and how it had changed over the years. In addition, I also found that the `gas station' had earlier been the depot of the Cumberland Valley Railroad (later the Pennsylvania Railroad). For Waynesboro, Pennsylvania there are Sanborn insurance maps for January 1886, October 1891, July 1896, October 1902, January 1910 and, finally, June 1947. One can therefore trace in detail the growth and decline of Waynesboro's two railroads -the Western Maryland and the Mont Alto (later the Cumberland Valley and, later still, the Pennsylvania) - building by building and track by track. You can even discover the appearance and disappearance of a turntable! I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of this HO scale ‘3D snapshot’ of my beloved hometown - Waynesboro, PA! Please come and visit in England!