Lawson Stevenson feared that the model railroad layout he built in his basement had reached the end of the line.

Stevenson started building the HO-scale layout more than 30 years ago. It measures about 30-by-25 feet and is tucked inside a subterranean room of his Garrison Road house. It has hundreds of feet of track, thousands of feet of wiring, and countless buildings, boats, human and animal figures, rolling stock and accessories, most of it crafted by Stevenson.

Disassembling and moving it would be a “mammoth task,” said his son, Brad.

Thus, the 86-year-old Lawson, who is too ill to run or maintain the layout, figured he would donate the four Hulett unloader models to the Ashtabula Maritime & Surface Transportation Museum and sell off the rest, piece by piece.

And then, Tuesday evening, members of his unnamed model railroad club and representatives from the museum met at Lawson’s house to discuss the possibility of donating the entire layout, which honors the New York Central’s operation between Ashtabula Harbor and Youngstown.

“They started talking about (taking) the whole layout,” Lawson said. “At first I didn’t go for that. But I got to thinking about it and said ‘What the heck.’ That’s the thing to do, is to give it to them.’”

The deal, which was been made with the blessing of Lawson’s two sons, Brad and Doug, and daughter Loraine Hampton, will transfer the entire layout to the museum.

The museum’s director, Robert Frisbie, said the layout will have its own room in the new museum that is on the drawing board. The proposed $4-million addition will be built adjacent to the former lighthouse keeper’s home on Walnut Boulevard. Frisbie said the room housing the layout will be named in Lawson Stevenson’s honor.

The plan is to make the layout available to members of the railroad club that has been meeting at Lawson’s home for 20 years. The group will be in charge in maintaining and running the layout for visitors.

The museum also hopes that having an operating model railroad in the museum will attract more model railroaders to the club, which, although its been around 20 years, still does not have a name.

Lawson Stevenson is a Plymouth Township native who worked for the U.S. Postal Service after returning from service in World War II. He took an early retirement at the age of 49 and devoted the ensuing years to his interests — music, traveling and model railroading.

“I don’t know where I got the bug for it,” Stevenson says of his railroading interest. His first layout was for his son, Doug, who was bedridden with illness.

“So we bought him a sheet of plywood and I modeled a 4-by-8-foot layout,” he says. “That got us interested. Then I got a little more interested and I met a guy in the post office who was really into model railroading, and we went from there.”

His first effort was to model a mountain railroad, Northern Pacific, from Duluth, Minn., to Seattle. The only place in his house with sufficient room to create a layout was a crawl space. He hand dug a narrow tunnel under the house, then built his layout on top of the dirt ledges along the room’s perimeter. Stevenson rigged up a grain conveyor to remove the dirt he shoveled out of the crawl space; the conveyor dumped the dirt in his pickup truck’s bed.

“It was narrow, just enough room to get in and out. If someone wanted to get out of the place, they all had to go out. I said ‘That’s no good,’ so we re-dug it. This time, I got all the model railroaders over there and all my friends dug it out and hauled the dirt away,” he says.

With a larger space to work in, Lawson shifted the focus of his layout to a railroad closer to home. He learned that the Hulett automatic unloaders at Ashtabula Harbor were being dismantled, and he decided he’d like to model them for his layout.

A master mechanic who worked on the unloaders gave Stevenson an insider’s tour of the mammoth machines, as well as access to their blueprints. He took hundreds of photographs and used them and the original plans to model all four of the unloaders in Plexiglas and Styrene.

Stevenson considers them the crowning achievement of his layout. Although they are not motorized, the Huletts do have moving parts that simulate their operation of discharging and loading bulk material from the holds of freighters.

Building the Huletts and a model of an ore carrier proved to be seminal events for Stevenson’s model railroad. He switched it to an A&B; Dock/New York Central layout that tracks the movement of coal from the mine to the freighters at Ashtabula, and the movement of iron ore from the freighters to the blast furnaces of Youngstown.

The layout includes an ore bridge plus operating coal machines that dump coal cars. One of them is a side dumper that unloads coal into the blast furnaces; another dumps its coal into a power plant model.

We’re talking real coal here, too.

“We haul the coal from a mine at the other end of the layout,” Stevenson says. “We dump coal into the mine, unload it into the cars, then haul it by train clear around the layout to the other end where we dump it.”

Stevenson said he never intended the layout to get as large as it did, with its multiple blocks of tracks, freighter models, coke ovens and rolling mills, rural scenes, roundhouse and city streets. And despite its size and complexity, he says a railroad modeler’s layout is never done.

He speaks as a recognized expert. He has received numerous certificates from the National Model Railroading Association and in December 2006 was named a Master Model Railroader by the organization. His layout has been featured in several magazine articles, and Brad says fellow model railroaders from all over the country have visited his father just to see his layout.

“It’s been a wonderful hobby for him,” says Brad, whose own interests run toward woodworking rather than model railroading.

Brad says being able to keep the layout intact in a museum is very special to the family, although he has no idea how all of it will be moved out of the tight space. His father says the models are built so they can be picked up and moved without disturbing the layout. That will be the easy part. Removing all the track, wiring and associated equipment won’t be as easy, however.

Frisbie says they plan crate the perimeter portions of the layout and store it in a climate-controlled area until the new museum is ready to receive it. The center portion, which models the Harbor, will be put on display in the existing museum, perhaps as early as next spring.

The museum is delighted to receive the donation, says Frisbie, because it not only depicts and preserves local history, but also preserves the story of Lawson Stevenson’s passion for model railroading.