This may sound a little silly but I'm going ask it anyway.Has anyone ever laid Fastrack all through their house from one room to another and back again?It seems to me that a really large temporary layout with broad curves would be pretty neat. Theoritically, with an infinite amount of space at your disposal and with TMCC control, you could follow the train from room to room all through the house. Most of us who are serious about this hobby have permanent layouts with scerenary, which is fine, I have that too, but I have just been thinking about trying this while the wife is gone on a trip. If you have tried this, how did it turn out? How big were the engines you ran? How long were the trains?
Is this just a dumb idea?
Thanks,
George
Sounds great!
Make sure you supply enough power to the tracks. Normally track is fed about every 8-feet. This makes for a lot of cable.
Kurt
OK, your mentioning that you are thinking of doing this while your wife is out of town now makes sense to me. Sure, I've done this with traditional 027 track taking up a couple of rooms - heck, that's one of the glories of our gauge - ie the 'Carpet Central' and millions of holiday layouts... I ran it on the floor - essentially a few gigantic extended loops, each with a single lockon and associated transformer. I was surprised at how well the power 'travelled', Kurt. The upside: it was fun to mess around with the track. The downside: it was a pain to take up again. I wanted to keep it there and scenic it
Doug Murphy 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...' Henry V.
I am the monster in your head...And I thought you'd learn by now, It seems you haven't yet.I am the venom in your skin --- Breaking Benjamin
Hmmmmmm,
"Hey Honny, when is your next trip" ;-)
jimhaleyscomet
jimhaleyscomet wrote: Hmmmmmm, "Hey Honny, when is your next trip" ;-) jimhaleyscomet
Modeling the Baltimore waterfront in HO scale
overall wrote:This may sound a little silly but I'm going ask it anyway.Has anyone ever laid Fastrack all through their house from one room to another and back again?It seems to me that a really large temporary layout with broad curves would be pretty neat. Theoritically, with an infinite amount of space at your disposal and with TMCC control, you could follow the train from room to room all through the house. Most of us who are serious about this hobby have permanent layouts with scerenary, which is fine, I have that too, but I have just been thinking about trying this while the wife is gone on a trip. If you have tried this, how did it turn out? How big were the engines you ran? How long were the trains?Is this just a dumb idea?Thanks,George
Sounds like Christmas at our house.
For several years now, our living room based Christmas layout has spilled out of the confines of that room, down the hallway to the bedrooms, past the hall bath and banking right into my son's bedroom. There is a reverse loop that runs under his bed with tunnel portals, that feeds the trains back to the living room.
I have had to run multi-conductor cabling from the control center in the living room through the basement for power feeds to a hall closet access & behind the bedroom door for track power and constant voltage to the switches.
We run everything on "O-72", "O-54", & "O-42"(min. dia.). Power is usually a PH-1 w/ PM-1/CAB-1, a RS-1, a CW-80(awesome transformer) or PowerChief 120 all phased for control to 3 loops/districts total.
Rob
Cool! I had a carpet HO layout for a while and it expanded to fill the livingroom. My wife made me take it down for company that November and after Christmas we got Chewy... Since then, I've only had a couple small O layouts that were temporaries...
This reminds me of a scene in a Cary Grant movie - I think it was People Will Talk!
RIP Chewy - best dog I ever had.
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
Was able to get away with it as a kid with O27, but doubt SWMBO would let me do it now. I do plan to expand the Christmas layout, but not that much.
dennis
TCA#09-63805
Ive had Lionel Trains since I was 9 but never set up a train around the tree. The cats would always go after them. But this year Im going on the offensive vs the animals. Im whipping out my loudest operating accessories to scare em off.
My little brother and sister are going on a surprise trip to disney world with my parents next month and Im going to set up the trains all over the house for when they get back (another surprise).
My goal would be about 200 feet of mainline in your example. That's a lot of uninterupted track in the average house. At about $3 something per foot it would be expensive, but very cool.
Keeping the track together was indeed the problem with the great carpet ryes of the 1950s. Most of us had hardwood floors. Wall-to-wall (nobody calls it that now) carpeting was a rare thing in those days. It was amazing how far a train could go after departing a separated track onto hardwood. Cause we ran em fast, don't ya know.
As far as cats go....perhaps a well aimed squirt gun would help!
Jim H
jimhaleyscomet wrote:As far as cats go....perhaps a well aimed squirt gun would help!Jim H
Deep fried, they taste like chicken. Or so I've been told...
I am so excited I found this post! I want to do the exact same thing as I do not have any room in which to create a layount like the ones I see here. I do have a large apartment, though and would love to have two lines run around the living room, dining room, den, foyer, and kitchen on the first floor. My cousin did it years ago.
I had my father's trains when I was young and am now getting really into them and collecting. I have 0-gauge track and trains and hardwood floors with large thick oriental carpeting. I fear issues with trains crossing the carpet fringe, old floor heating vents, thresholds.... Any suggestions? The trains spark now and again, and I worry about fire with the track (NOT fastrack) sitting directly on the carpet. Anyone have any tips or words of caution?
I am excited to work on the layout - up and through end tables and under couches - with the ability to use switches to create multiple routes. Any creative ideas or tips are welcome!
Heather
Stores like Home Depot have this rolling up plastic sheet that comes in about 2 foot widths. It is used to lay on carpets in high traffic areas. You might want to try laying that under the track if you are overly worried about carpet. As always, make sure transformers are uplugged before leaving the house.
Why should we NEVER leave trains running unattended? Because fires although extremely rare can happen. Sometimes you get a high resistent short...not enough to short the circuit breaker but just enough to really heat something up. This happend at my club once or twice on derailments. Mind you this is after running about 12 hours per week for years.
Still...I would be very careful about having anything flamable near tracks (thinking carpet fringe here or papier machie).
I often let trains run in another room (such as during party at christmas) but I am sure to check in fairly often.
Thanks all - the plastic under the track at certain points is a good idea.
I would NEVER leave the trains running unattended or the transformer on and care too much about them to have them going with guests milling about. I figure I would remove the track crossing doorways and other places where people could trip when I had people over.
So, part of the layout would be permanent and others temporary. I don't think I could ever settle on a truly permanent layout. I recall that once I laid out a track and played with it, I soon wanted to tear it down and rebuild. Now I can do the same on a much larger scale as a grown-up with 7 rooms...
Someday I will be able to afford my own place and will cut holes through walls as passageways to avoid trains cutting across high-traffic areas. :)
"No childhood should be without a train!"
ADCX Rob Sounds like Christmas at our house... Rob
Sounds like Christmas at our house...
Christmas Trains 2010 (1)
Christmas Trains 2010 (2)
When my wife heads out to Seattle to visit family I set up my Standard Gauge stuff all through the house. Kind of neat watching those big ole electric trains rumbling through out the house.
Bill T.
The best way I have found to keep track sections together and to make a good electrical connection is as follows:
Grab the center rail where the pin is, and bend it to the right slightly. Similarly, bend the left rail to the left. The bends should move the end of the pin about half its diameter. Now when you insert the pins into the next section, there is force on the pins, not only in the mating track section, but also in the track section where the pins are installed. When you take the track apart, you do not have to do anything to connect the track sections again. After all the track sections are bent, you can put your pliers away. Back in the '50s, AF recommended this for their 2 rail track.
Now I am trying to figure out why it took me almost 60 years to discover this technique.
BTW, the recommended Lionel method of squeezing the openings in each track section doesn't work very well by comparison.
BB
I have recently been using the tip servoguy recommends and it works great. But like he says, bend "slightly". It doesn't take much.
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