Its been awhile since I've posted about my own layout but I am in a "sharing moment" so thought I would pass some "gotcha" experiences along. Trust me, my intent is NOT a "blow by blow" blog (boringggg) how to (or how not to), but just a few bullet items that might help you in the scenicking of your layout.
As a bit of background, mine is a two level 11x15 HO layout, set in the '50s in Santa Fe (and a bit of IC) territory. Its a room filling oval layout with a duckunder to get into the middle.
The design, backdrop, benchwork, roadbed, trackwork, wiring and testing went fairly quickly. The around the wall edge of the layout scenery - blending layout surface to the backdropped walls - didn't take all that long either.
Now I'm finishing up the scenery, having three small areas left to groundcover and detail. Here are some of my "I knew better than that" findings.......
- Spend a lot of time getting your structures placed. Without groundcover and such, its easy to move the structures around without difficulty. What looks good at first just may fall out of favor in short order.
- I originally had a plethora of kit built structures just perfect for the layout or so I thought. But as I got close to the end of the scenicking, I realized I was squeezing stuff in that just didn't look right. So I removed some of the structures and got a nice surprise. Yes, fewer structures actually looked better!
- The layout process is (to most of us) about the railroad. And, in that regard, some of us neglect construction and placement of roads and parking areas for employees and dock space for trucks, etc. So try to get these areas into your design along with the structures - before the scenery comes down.
- When you begin with your scenery, start from furthest points (hard to reach) and work inward. Yup, that should be totally obvious, but.........
- I have many different ballasts that I've used for the various tracks(main/yard/siding/terminal/etc). I also have many different stone groundcovers used for various roads. The problem is I did not identify exactly which went where, and ran out of some that I later needed again.
But didn't know exactly what to buy - be it mfg, color, or size. So, if you have more than a few types of road/ballast covers, I suggest that you record them.
- Lastly, during each phase of the scenery, test your trains. It's amazing how a bit of glue mix can wick into a turnout or cement a bit of ballast on the inside of a rail. Yes, if you don't test soon after doing an area, you will forget and have to deal with it later - often having to crawl over freshly scenicked areas. I know....
Hey, I suspect you all have some "I knew better than that" stories, and it would be good to hear them.......
ENJOY !
Mobilman44
Living in southeast Texas, formerly modeling the "postwar" Santa Fe and Illinois Central
I am at the point where I need to start building my scenery closest to the walls and the painted backdrop on them. It's actually a surprisingly persistent item in terms of forgetfulness. For me. I keep thinking about getting the tracks laid, wired, and tested, but I should not have them in place before all the dirty work that needs to be done first. Yet, my mind keeps drifting the the stuff I should be putting off....I guess because I want to get to running trains.
Good list, good reminders, and thanks for posting.
BTW, if you ever run out of ballast, and would prefer to use real grains of sand as opposed to the ground walnut shells, look no further than your local landscaping supplier or even a builders' supply. They have cleanish sand in piles for people who need to mix it with things or who want a clean sandy 'beach' or whatever around ponds. Hardware stores often sell bags of 'sharp' sand that can be used in sandboxes if one is making one for the kids.
If supply of the perferred kind is limited, maybe concentrate on the mains to keep them consistent, and use whatever else you can find that will do on spurs, industrial tracks, sidings, etc.
The one thing I learned that sticks out most in my mind was that I cut up a macramé rope to use as wild grass and painstakingly applied it by hand on a peninsula where it looked great on the flat land. I used the same technique on the side of a mountain and wound up with a hairy looking hillside. The grass did not scale down well when applied to the mountain. Mountains look better when you use forced perspective, meaning objects on the top of the mountain appear much smaller than things at the bottom which are closer to the viewer. Instead of using the grass on the mountains I just used paint and Lifelike brand Earth (dyed sawdust). Then I used extra course ground foam to represent bushes and far off trees.
As far as streets and parking lots: I try to plan all of them from the start. In general my layout is viewed as if you are standing in the middle of a street with half of the street modeled. I have several parking lots however many of them have a very limited amount of parking, but then everything on my layout is compressed. Building spacing: Lots of buildings close together equals urban city area. Suburban, less structures, no tall buildings, mostly commercial and residential. Rural, lots of room between structures, more open areas and agriculture.
Great report back full of useful and candid information.
Your comments on leaving room for both changes in structures and leaving enough room for credible scenery are very worthwhile. I went into the planning process knowing I needed to do that as a studious student of Mr. Armstrong. Even thought I did. Barely and not quite. But this is also an area where you can get away with all sorts of selective compression tricks...which do work better with some extra room. I've been very lucky, sometimes creative, and a little short of what I'd prefer, but doing something about it almost requires doing something about it long before you realize how cramped things may look once track is in.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Because I lost about a third of my planned layout room to other uses, and ended up with an oddly-shaped room with ten corners, I simply built the benchwork to fit the room, then layed sub-roadbed in a manner which fit the benchwork and kept all the mainline curves greater than 30" - most are 34" or bigger. As I was installing that subroadbed, the scenes began to present themselves in my head, and, for the most part, have been realised pretty-much as I had envisioned them. The smaller room did force scenes to be more compressed, but overall, I'm glad that things turned out the way they did, including the smaller room, which seemed to force me to come up with solutions for both the track and the scenery through which it runs.
It's not, of course, all perfectly to my liking, but there's only a couple of scenic areas, not yet developed beyond landforms, that will need a little "adjustment" (with a hammer and some rock castings) to create believeable scenes.
Wayne
I have limited most structures and trees behind track the reason being that my big clumsy hands need to access the track.
Joe Staten Island West
Good points, all. So now, a few of my own.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - slowly, and thoroughly documented)
Forgot to mention.......
My previous layout (1994-2008) was very similar to the current one. When it was in the construction phase - and amended when "complete" - I put together a list of "what I did right", "what I did wrong", "what worked", "what didn't", and "ideas for the next layout". This list proved invaluable when constructing the second layout (2008 -). I cannot stress enough how the lists reminded me of stuff that I otherwise might have forgotten to do - especially during the appropriate phases of production.
So if you are young enough to have another layout in your future, I suggest you make yourself some notes as I did. Oh, sorry for my lack of pics on this thread, I assume you all can envision what I'm talking about.
mobilman44I put together a list of "what I did right", "what I did wrong", "what worked", "what didn't", and "ideas for the next layout".
Right. That is what I do also. The list might just be in my head but I remember. For me it's not the next layout, it's the next section of the current layout as I tend to concentrate on one area at a time.