Prokhorovsk Terminal (PT) belongs to the type of railway modeling known as prototype freelancing.  This is a style where a real-life railroad and its operations are modeled as accurately as possible (or is desirable), but the locations depicted are generalized - i.e. "typical" of what is found on the real thing, and do not specifically correspond to any particular cities/towns/villages on the map.
     The operating prototype of PT is the October Railway of the Joint Stock Company (JSC) "Russian Railways" or OAO "Rossiyskiye Zhelezniye Dorogi".

[Note that in the summer of 2004, the Ministry of Ways of Communications of the Russian Federation (Ministerstvo Putey Soobcheniya, or MPS), which, under various similar names, has been in charge of railways since the times of Imperial Russia, was abolished, and replaced by a government-owned corporate entity.]

     Geographically, the October Railway covers almost all of northwestern Russia, with St. Petersburg forming a "hub" of sorts for the system.  From it, the lines extend in five main directions - Finland to the northwest, Murmansk to the north, Moscow to the southeast, extreme western Russia (Pskov, Novgorod, etc) and Belarus to the south, and Estonia to the west.
     Even though it's not geographically central, the 650-km (403-mile) St. Petersburg-Moscow line is by far the most important on the railway, and, as a result, the most technologically advanced, with maximum passenger train speeds currently standing at 200 km/h (125 mph).  A couple of daytime "high-speed" trains currently cover the distance in 4 hours and 30 minutes.
     You can view a detailed (albeit Russian-language only) map of the railway located on RZD's official site by clicking on its shrunken version on the right.

     The layout is based around the station in the city of Prokhorovsk, however, you may notice that such a town does not exist in Russia (at least to my knowledge)!  This is where the "freelancing" part of prototype freelancing comes in.  Prokhorovsk is a generalized version of a typical small city/large town located in the European part of the former Soviet Union. 

     Even though Prokhorovsk does not exist in real-life, those of you who've been around in modeling circles might nevertheless find the name somehow familiar.  Don't worry, your memory is not playing any tricks on you - the town is named in honor of Igor Prokhorov, a Moscow-based modeler whose achievements, even back in the Soviet days, provided an inspiration for Chris' work.

     The layout itself can best labeled as a small, HO-scale, 2-rail DC, classic British-style, Continental (European) layout.  While the prototype is indeed located within continental Europe, everything else about Prokhorovsk Terminal follows classic British storage-to-terminal practices.

     At its basics, this is a switching layout, with no provisions for continuous operation.  All activity is concentrated around the Prokhorovsk station, with everything else basically dedicated to open staging, including layout's link to the outside world - the mainline to St. Petersburg.  As can be seen on the layout diagram on the right (found on Jeremy Yoder's Model Russian Railways Web site), it is built in the shape of a "U", with Prokhorovsk station and the main freight yard/open staging on opposite "legs" of the letter.

     The general time period for the layout is the forty-year span between 1960 and 2000.  Obviously, Soviet, and then Russian, equipment changed significantly over those forty years, and thus, Chris' goal is to have three distinct sets of equipment - one for realistic 1960 operations, one for realistic 1980 operations, and one that will allow realistic operations in the post-Soviet environment - i.e. the year 2000.

     Electrically, Prokhorovsk is pretty straight forward - early on, Chris decided that DCC command control would be a necessity, and the brand of choice was Digitrax.  No special wiring exists for turnout control as all turnouts are manually set via push-rods, and to help to diagnose problems, the layout is divided into electrically-isolated blocks. The signals, which can be visible on some photos, are, for now, purely cosmetic and do not function.

     As the prototype is electrified via catenary energized at 3000V DC, so an attempt was made to represent that electrification on the layout - and the result is rather impressive.  It is made more impressive by the fact that all poles and wires are scratch-built, as none of the commercially available products (i.e. those from Viessmann and Sommerfeldt) are correct for ex-Soviet railway electrifications.  The catenary is fully capable of being operated "live", however, to keep things simple, all electric current is fed via the two rails, and the raised pantographs serve a purely cosmetic purpose.

     The rolling stock fleet is perhaps the most interesting part of the layout.  Because Russian railway modeling is still not commercially developed, the only mass-produced models are those of the WLABm-class international sleeping cars, and these are produced by Sachsenmodelle of Germany.  The electric locomotives are scratchbuilt, and the rest are either modified commercial models (for example, the M62), or small-series production (TEP10, DR1A, and various freight cars).