Since @InterurbanEra asked about my current model railroad layout and the concept I'm thinking about for a future one, here they are. This is a long post, so the biggest part is under a cut.
My current layout is actually the first ever permanent layout I've done, and as you can see it's very compact (there really wasn't space for anything bigger). It's an N scale layout set in the fictive town of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stadt on the Baltic Sea coast of East Germany, circa 1970. I wanted something relatively easy for my first layout, as the last time I had actually built a model of something was Star Trek ships, closer to 30 years ago. East Germany is a country I find interesting, and the rolling stock for it is easy to find (unlike other subjects I could have chosen – including my native country Finland).
The current layout as it exists today. Some of the buildings are waiting to be replaced and obviously the landscaping is still very much a work in progress. And yes, that's a small starship Enterprise there. The plan is to suspend it above the layout, and add figurines painted in Starfleet uniforms into the layout.
Now, as for the concept I'm mulling over... there's actually two, the simpler one and the one where pretty much everything will need to be scratch-built (the latter was the one I mentioned in my reblog of InterurbanEra's post). Both would be set in Finland... kind of.
The simpler concept is a municipally-owned railway in Finland. Finnish railroads have been pretty much dominated by the state railways (VR, presented here in jocular form by @valtionrautatiet-official), but there have also been privately-owned ones, both Finnish standard gauge (1524 mm Russian Imperial gauge) and various narrow gauges, one of which was the municipally-owned Rauma railroad. The broad-gauge ones were all sold to the state railways (usually after only a few years of operation, though the Rauma RR was an exception, remaining independent for 53 years) and the narrow-gauge ones either closed down or sold to the state and converted into broad gauge).
My idea would be a municipal railroad (either broad- or narrow gauge, depending on how ambitious I'm feeling) of a fairly large city, set in 1970s where in addition to freight the city-owner has decided to utilise the railroad as the primary public transport of a new commuter town (lähiö for the fellow Finnish people among us), allowing me to build a bunch of concrete buildings of the 1970s of the kind I grew up in.
If this was in broad gauge, the railroad would use NOHAB "nose" locos (a Swedish-built variant of the EMD F7, for those not in the know), as NOHAB built five of these for the Finnish gauge in 1959, expecting an order from VR, but this never happened and the locos were regauged and sold to Norway instead. If a private Finnish broad-gauge rail operator existed at the time, this would have been an ideal chance for them to dieselise. And from the modeler's point of view, there are numerous models of the NOHAB nose available.
(I hope the Flickr embed code works, there should be a photo of a Norwegian NOHAB nose (Di3) above).
The more complex concept starts from the premise of "what if the 1809 Finnish War never happened?" Most of what is today known as Finland would have remained a part of Sweden, and quite possibly never have become independent. On the other hand, the areas retroactively referred to as Old Finland (Finnish-majority areas conquered by Russia from Sweden in 1721 and 1743) would have developed very differently, likely following a broadly similar path to the Baltic States – including in terms of railroad development, where connections considered strategically important would have been in Russian broad gauge, but much of the rest built cheaper in narrow gauge, probably 750 mm.
Likely the area in question would have become independent in the aftermath of the October Revolution (as the Baltic States did), in all likelihood under the name Karelia.1 and my grand plan is an H0e layout representing one of the narrow-gauge lines that would likely have connected the capital Viipuri/Vyborg to the northeastern bits of the country: Käkisalmi/Priozersk/Kexholm, Sortavala and Suojärvi, as they would have been in the 1920s-30s during the (first) independence of the fictive country.
The problem with the Karelia idea, and the narrow-gauge version of the municipal railroad in Finland idea, is that there was no standardized rolling stock to draw from, no pre-existing models that one could simply buy and repaint, and not even limited-run kits like you have of some Finnish rolling stock; everything would need to be scratch-built. So very much a challenge, but could also be an interesting challenge.
An example of Finnish narrow-gauge rolling stock, Jokioinen rautatie loco number 5 from 1917, with passenger carriages from various Finnish narrow-gauge railroads. My photo.
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The name Finland originally referred to the southwestern bits of present-day Finland, so in my opinion using that name for this area as an independent state is extremely unlikely. Also, the different areas named Karelia, and the distinctions between the Karelian dialect of Finnish language and the Karelian languages are far more complex than I want to dedicate my time to on an entry about a model railroad concept.