Am a 'newbie' returning to modelling in HO guage. This forum seems like a good place to go for answer/suggestions re our hobby - from tablework construction to operational and photo-ready completion. My layout design fits a 10ft X 25ft room. The long sidewalls (@23ft ea.) seem ideal for a "shelf" (each 12in - 18in wide). I would like to have double-track "mains", point-to-point along the sidewalls including a 'peninsula' with 25" - 28" radii curves. I have two questions:
Is there a minimum width along a 'shelf' to accomodate double-track plus appropriate scenery?
What is the appropriate width - center-line to center-line - for double-track straight sections; and curved sections?
I designed and built my train room, with a house over the top for the CFO.
This shot is about 5" wide:
Just to the (my) north it goes to a double main.This is about 10" wide. Track spacing is 11/2":
Hope it helps.
Terry
Terry in NW Wisconsin
Queenbogey715 is my Youtube channel
Thanks to Terry for your reply to my two inquiries.
Rodney "Georgia Flash"
1 1/2" seems a little too narrow - even for straight double track. NMRA recommendation is, IIRC, 2" for straight track and going up to 2 1/2" for curved track with a narrow radius like 18".
beautiful trackwork terry, but 1 1/2" track centers works out to less than 12' in HO scale. actually more like 11' 9" that seems a little close to me. if things had been that close when i worked on the railroad, something must have been on the ground. of course, yard tracks often had wider spacing than main lines.
grizlump
Georgia Flash My layout design fits a 10ft X 25ft room. The long sidewalls (@23ft ea.) seem ideal for a "shelf" (each 12in - 18in wide). I would like to have double-track "mains", point-to-point along the sidewalls including a 'peninsula' with 25" - 28" radii curves.
When you say "point to point" that implies you will have a terminus at each end. Will you have enough staging to need two main tracks?
If you want a peninsula it will be very, very tight to project it from the short wall. The room is 10 ft wide. If you made the turns on the end of the peninsula 24 and 22" radius (pretty tight) that would mean the "blob" on the end of the peninsula would be about 4.5 ft wide. Putting a 18" aisle on either side of the blob (about as narrow as one person can comfortably squeeze through) that uses 3 ft for aisles which leaves you 2.5 ft for ALL of the shelves on both sides of the room. So your layout near the blob would be about 15" or less deep. Every inch you increase teh blob radius, you decrease the benchwork depth on each side by that amount.
On the long peninsula portion, if you have 30" aisles (about the minimum for two people to pass, friendly but not intimate) that takes up 5 feet of the 10 ft space. So that leaves you 5 feet TOTAL of benchwork to run 4 double track mains through, so each scene would be about 15" deep.
Short answer, no, its whatever you think is too narrow. Your absolute minimum is about 6" wide, but that leaves virtually no room for scenery. Typically benchwork is 18-30" deep.
2" on the straight portions, 2" to 2 1/4" on the curved portions.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
Hi Georgie,
You have to take Dave's comments very seriously; on one subject I disagrea with him, I would never go for an aisle less then 24"wide. Or the math the other way around: two one foot wide shelves and two aisles both two foot wide leaves you with a four foot wide peninsula. Nice in HO for a branchline with a tight 18" radius, not for a double tracked mainline. The radii you want to use need a 5' 6" wide peninsula and you'll end up with no space for shelves along the walls.
Byron Henderson's (Cuyama on this forum) checklist for potential customers: http://home.earthlink.net/~mrsvc/id13.html
On this webside you can find one of his landmark layouts: the San Jacinto and Santa Fe. The design is by Andy Sperandeo and beside being one of my old time favorites, it will give you a pretty good idea about the possibility's on a 10 foot wide layout. How to use the addional ten foot length is something else.
Having two staging area's beyond your terminals is shortening your mainline considerable. Keep in mind that choosing a double track mainline implies lots of long trains. You'll have to buy and pay them all.
Anyhow you should give much more information; about the era (are you into modern 1 foot long autoracks?), about the room (make a drawing of the room with the obstacles like doors drawn in), of the trackplan (not detailed, rough outlines only) and even about the scale. As a newbie you can switch to N-scale relatively cheap now if you fancy double tracked mainlines.
The footprint you have chosen and your wishes(druthers) are not going well together. You will have some difficult dicisions to take. You are going to fast; try to picture how many trains you want to run during a session. Jef Wilson previous design faced the same problem; keeping the mains filled with hotshots is taking large staging area's for a very brief online appearence. He started all over, with a different concept.
http://www.chipengelmann.com/
A webside of a once newbie, also about the costs of mistakes.
Keep smiling, keep having fun and good luck
Paul
On a side note, I would check out John Sterling shelf components at a local "big box" home supply store. They come in various widths and lengths from 8" to 16" wide and up to 6' long. I'm using 16" by 36" sections as my benchwork. In have a four track yard that fits comfortably in that width, with building flats along the backdrop and a spacing between two of the yard to tracks for some small buildings. You could probably fit six tracks in if you wanted to. Below the layout I'm using 12" x 72" shelfs for storage.
Sheesh,guys, my bad!!
The spacing is TWO and 1/2 "
in that last shot. Must have been a brain fart!
The yard at Spooner is 2' wide:
Sorry for the dumb answer.
Track centers will also depend somewhat on the era. In steam days they would often be between 13' and 14 feet, so actually slightly under 2" in HO scale. Most existing railroad lines still reflect the old standards. It is better to stay a bit wider, so use 2" on straight track. Model railroad curves are much sharper than on the prototype, so track centers need to widened considerably there. The NMRA provides recommendations (standards?) on what numbers to use.
Out west, with new construction and plenty of room, much wider track centers are now preferred whenever possible. It gives more working room for track maintenance, and derailments may, with luck, not foul the adjacent track and completely shut down the railroad.
John
Paul:
I want to thank you for your tips; am taking Dave's and your advice/suggestions seriously enough to rethink my 'wishes' and 'druthers'. I am at the point now where I absolutely CANNOT! afford making costly errors.
I do want continuous running. The widest "blob" end of the (construction complete) peninsula is 5ft. This leaves me 30inches of aisle on both sides. The adjacent 'shelves' would be 6-inches wide X 3-ft long. I thought that I would limit the 'scenery' to either tunnels or lots of trees, shrubs, etc.I am willing to forego the idea of a double-track mainline.
I had a previous layout in HO and I still have rolling stock and buildings, etc. Sadly, all of my motive power was stolen; so, I am starting from scratch. However, I do want to continue modelling the era during which small railroads transitioned from steam to diesel. The modern era does nothing for me.
I really appreciate this forum; thanks again for your input.
"Georgia Flash"
My double track is spaced 2" on the straights, and 2 1/4" on the curves. The main sections of my layout are 30" deep, but I do have one section about 10" deep:
Nick
Take a Ride on the Reading with the: Reading Company Technical & Historical Society http://www.readingrailroad.org/
hi
If something don't fit you have to adjust. When you have a smaller radius (18") you will have a 4' wide peninsula. With two 24" aisles you'll end up with two shelves each a foot wide; small but do-able. A 18"radius also means you'll get a nice long branch.
To get a continuous run you have to build a duckunder or a drop-in section. Did you consider a C-shaped layout? Just asking. You also mentioned point to point, two terminals connected by staging?
It is wise to provide us with a drawing of your space, with all the obstacles, like doors drawn in.
Sorry to hear about your misfortunes.
Do you allready have ideas beyond the era? Name, location, rural or urban? Switching industry's or/and classification or just mainline running? Trainlength? Staging? How do you envision to operate your layout? Alone, with the cat on one knee, a grandchild on the other and a cup of coffee and a cigar in your hands? Or with a bunch of sweaty guy's bringing to life a day on the good old ....RR? Or in between?
Keep smiling and keep having fun
Good luck
If your motive power was stolen (a nasty day that must have been), I hope you are very seriously looking at DCC wiring and operations? If this is new to you, you can save yourself some costs in time and materials, although DCC tends to be more expensive, particularly if you are desirous of sound-equipped engines.
-Crandell