If you are a native of Illinois, you'll know that there's no "Dewarville" anywhere in the state. For this layout, I once again decided to create a fictional city and area, but based loosely on real places. This way, I need not slavishly recreate real places that would require scratch-building abilities beyond my time, interest, ability, or money.
With my last HO layout in mind, I was tempted to set this one in California once more. But the lack of N scale passenger cars for Amtrak California dissuaded me. Had such California or Surfliner cars been offered in N, I probably would have picked California again. It is my home state, and while not the rail mecca that Illinois is, California probably rates second in the nation in terms of passenger and freight rail activity and variety.
So "back" in Illinois and with the certainty the layout would be set on BNSF Railway rails, the next choice was: where in Illinois? Galesburg, which still has the convergence of the old BN and ATSF lines, was my first choice. I had invested in KATO's METRA MP36PH-3S and Nippon Sharyo bilevel commuter cars but my thought was any such appearance on the layout would be rather long-distance "specials" out of Chicago. With the Salt Lake Route track plan only have a two track mainline, the idea of a setting along the famous "Racetrack" From Chicago to Aurora seemed out of the question.
The "Racetrack" reverts to double-track around the point of the Aurora METRA station. So why not it set it around Aurora? Well, I intended to run Amtrak trains and Amtrak vacated Aurora years ago for Naperville.
Thus, I decided to create a sort of hybrid city that merged elements of Aurora and Naperville. As for the intermodal yard in the Salt Lake Route track plan, I thought of calling that part of the huge BNSF Cicero yard. But the SLR would never do justice to such a huge yard.
The old BN yard at Eola, smaller and just before Aurora, seemed a better fit. Eola also had the bonus of being a terminus (using BNSF trackage rights) of the Illinois Railway (IR) shortline that would provide me the opportunity to run some varied locomotives.
So technically this area would not have the triple-track "Racetrack" but this was an element of real-life that would have to be sacrificed for the needs of the track plan.
Next, what should I call this fictional city? The Fox River flows through Aurora and that seemed like a very Midwestern name for a city. I also looked at Google maps for any neighborhood or district names that I could appropriate.
I decided then to take apart "Naperville." The city is named for settled Joseph Naper. "Naper" is a Scottish occupational surname derived from those who produced linen. Checking out other Scottish occupational surnames, I came up with "Dewar," derived from those who kept holy relics. This name had the added tie-in to the Dewar's Scotch commercials featuring the oh-so-lovely English actress Claire Forlani faking a Scots accent. Dewarville it was!
Looking at the SLR track plan, the geography then took shape. The northern part of the layout would center around Dewarville METRA/Amtrak station and part of downtown Dewarville. Part of the Fox River would flow under the bridge to the west of the city.
The southern part of the layout would be taken up with Dewarville Yard, based on Eola. That left the right middle which would be the ADM grain elevator complex. I looked for any ADM facilities near Aurora or Naperville. I could not find any. There is a large ADM complex in Clinton, Iowa, just across the Mississippi River from Illinois (but quite a ways from Naperville). Thus, I have kept this part of the layout's location geographically rather vague, which might allow me to run multiple other railroads to it.
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