June Model Railroader previews Chattanooga layouts, from live steam to N scale

The June Model Railroader issue reaches for two very different kinds of railroad magic: Eagle Point, a 7½-inch-gauge line in the mountains of southern Tennessee, and Robert Bonham’s N scale Phree Lanz & Phanta Zee Railroad, a fictional western railroad shaped by a trucking-and-logistics career. Together, they read less like a simple layout preview than two working models of how to build a railroad with a point of view.

Eagle Point is the bigger visual punch. The live-steam line sits at the giant-scale end of the hobby, where the real lesson is not just size but infrastructure. A railroad that runs outdoors through mountain terrain has to solve grading, access, curvature, maintenance, and operational flow before it can even think about scenery. The magazine’s framing makes it clear why that matters to readers: Eagle Point is one of two layouts conventiongoers can visit as part of the Chattanooga program, and its afternoon operating session near Dunlap, Tennessee, is separate from the convention itself. That makes it a destination railroad, the kind of layout where the physical railroad is the story.

Bonham’s Phree Lanz & Phanta Zee offers the opposite lesson. Instead of acreage and heavy infrastructure, it shows how a modeler can turn a personal work history into a believable railroad world in N scale. The fictional western U.S. road suggests operations that are driven by the way freight moves, not just by scenery choices. That makes it a useful contrast to Eagle Point: one layout solves the problem of outdoor immersion at full human scale, while the other solves the problem of fitting character, traffic, and scene composition into a compact footprint.

The timing lines up with the 2026 NMRA National Convention, the Scenic City Express, which was set for Chattanooga from July 27 to August 2. The first Chattanooga national convention comes with more than 200 hours of clinics, layout tours, prototype tours, operating sessions, and a National Train Show at the Chattanooga Convention Center. The Chattanooga Marriott Downtown, linked to the center by a covered walkway, serves as the official hotel. The convention schedule also points to layout open houses in the Chattanooga area and operating sessions on three onsite layouts.

The citywide scale of the event fits the issue’s approach. Chattanooga’s National T-TRAK layout effort is being promoted as a record attempt, with more than 10,000 square feet, 810 modules, and a 91.7-mile uninterrupted route on the Scenic City Route. Against that backdrop, the June issue does exactly what the best convention preview should do: it gives readers two sharply different railroad problems to borrow from, one carved into Tennessee mountains and the other imagined in N scale.