I'm looking for track plans for a small route can you help me please?

[Anonymous]

The house i live in now is verry small and im in the research stages , Im going to have this a 8x8 model railroad and im wondering if any one got some track plans for me? I need ideas.

[SpaceMouse]

What scale? HO or N. N will give you a lot of possibilities. Either way, you won't be able to reach the center. Figure a reach of 30"--so think in terms of a doughnut.

[ndbprr]

Basically the answer is no and not to be meanspirited. The greatest designer of our time was John Armstrong who would sell his services. In order to give the customer what he wanted he needed some information. he would ask the following questions:
1. Space (given at 8' x8')
2. Do you lean toward operation or mainline action?
3. Any specific railroad in mind?
4. Branchline or mainline?
5. Type of equipment you want to run?
6. Frequency of trains?
7. Point to point or endless loop?
8. One level or multilevel?
9. Minimum radius?
10. Scale?
There are probably others that I don't remember. All these issues need to be given to anyone who would help design a layout or offer a suggestion. Repost with as much info as you can and you will probably get some good layouts suggested. good Luck.

[Anonymous]

Try this link: http://www.thortrains.net/4holayx.html

There are several good ones for about the space you mention. I don't know what scale you have, but you can convert these plans for any scale. Just know the bigger the scale, the more you may have to eliminate.

[Anonymous]

If you're just starting or returning to the hobby you might want to look at a book of plans. I know both Atlas and Model Railroader publi***hem, and there's probably others out there. That's what I did when I got started last fall. You don't get the level of customization that you might like, but on the other hand it's all pre-baked and I found it got me to concentrate on the basics of assembly and avoid design trouble. Also, living in an apartment, I couldn't very well do a whole-room layout.
As for scale, I'd suggest N. I'd worked an HO layout when I was younger, but when I started looking I found I could get a lot more layout in with N scale. Sometimes I look at the HO ads with a bit of envy, but there's a fairly good selection in N these days.

[Anonymous]

Trainfan, if you want to get trains running soon, check out Kalmbach or Atlas plans. Kalmbach is much better for realistic railroading. Atlas seems to want to sell its track, so sometimes crams too much track in the space. If you want to design your own, grab some graph paper, but watch out, because you could spend too much time doing that and get discouraged. Also, consider going around the walls. 8 by 8 will not allow easy access unless you have arms five feet long. Shelves 18 inches wide will be plently of space for single track HO, and 24 inches will be fine for double track. Easy L-girder bench work is very forgiving of amateur carpentry, and you won't even have to damage any drywall. Anyway, have fun and good luck.

[Anonymous]

Just want to point out that Thor's site that RedneckRob points out has small plans for some more scales a couple of clicks up form the URL he posted.

http://www.thortrains.net/trackplan/minipdex.html

Mike Tennent

[orsonroy]

If I was to only have 8x8 to play trains with, I'd build a carbon copy of Steve Flanigan's Georgia RR layout, from the April, 2001 MR. Not only did the design win MR's small layout article contest, but it's one of the nicest layouts to ever grace the cover of MR, period!

Even if you don't want to copy someone else's layout, the article is well worth looking into, to see how others have come up with solutions to designing for that small a space.

And do a search in the magazine index to the top of this page. I did a quick search for "8x8 track plans", and came up with 26 hits.