I've just been perusing the December issue of the Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine (free) and came across a link to 164 track plans that have been posted by modellers (or should I say modelers?) from around the world, but mostly from North America.       Link at: http://mrhmag.com/track-plan-database        The majority are HO, but there are a fair few N gauge layouts as well as several O and Z scale layouts. The layouts range from the massive that occupy whole basements with multiple levels to small end-to-end switching layouts. Overall, the style of these layouts seems to me to differ significantly from the mostly UK layouts posted on the NGF. On UK layouts, passenger stations are prominent and double tracks frequent, whereas in the US it seems that stations are generally replaced by industrial yards and single track main lines more common.

Even though most of my track is already laid, having a look at what others have done or are planning is still very interesting to me.

Webbo

I subscribe to MRH (cos it's free  ), and I'm not surprised at the lack of stations and double tracks in the track plan database.  The Financial Times last weekend had an article that pointed out that the chances of an average American seeing a passenger train were less than that of seeing a cricket game or Morris dancing.

American railroads have been freight oriented for a long, long time now!! That is, of course, excluding the commuter corridors around New England and Washington DC, or have they ceased now as well?

Amtrak still limps along as do a lot of fairly local commuter lines around some of the bigger cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, NYC, etc.).  Rumours of high speed lines surface every now and then, but predominately you're looking at freight over here, which will take precedence over a passenger movement in most cases.

I think if you exclude light rail then that's probably true. But most major cities have some form of light rail or other, or a conventional underground/subway system.

True passenger trains that operate on the freight railroads are very rare. Federal safety regs seem to preclude the use of DMU/EMU's.
In Colorado they are planning on building a light rail extension parallel to the BNSF line from Denver to Longmont, so both freight and light rail will have a seperate single track line running parallel to each other,

John P