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Other than heat & cold, humidity & dust may be your biggest issues. The most obvious solution, if you are going to be driving a car in and out of one side of the garage is to partition off the railroad half, providing it with it's own door and preferably, a window also. Insulate the ceiling & hang sheetrock there if there are exposed rafters. This will go a long way to keeping the dust down, the insects out & in general, give you a tidy room to build your layout. If the RR half has its own overhead door, I would frame a wall against the closed overhead door, insulate it & hang some sheetrock. Leave the overhead doors in place. From the outside nothing will change & it won't attract the attention of nosy neighbors, building inspectors and tax assessors, all who will want to know, as Tom Waits asked in his song, "What's he building in there?" An electric heating unit, hard wired with a thermostat is probably your fastest, cheapest & cleanest way of getting a heating system into the space. Probably the most expensive to operate, though. A small room air-conditioner mounted in that window I mentioned will help you keep your cool on those sweltering NJ days I remember so well. Plan carefully, both track & the partition wall if you build it, so expanding into the other half of the garage is no more painful than deciding the Hummer will live outside. If you build the partition as large panels that can be separated by unbolting them with only a minimum of sheetrock cutting, you can reuse them when you expand, or at worst, remove them without covering everything in demolition dust. Track planning is such an individual/preference oriented task that is hard to know where to begin. A multi-level layout would require a helix or a natural "ramping" up. A helix does seem to give more linear feet of mainline. I would suggest first making a list of the industries you are interested in modeling, and arrange them in a logical order along the mainline. Iron mine -> furnace -> ore dock for example. Or Logging camp -> sawmill ->papermill -> interchange. Life isn't always this tidy and industries aren't always laid out in a logical order along the tracks but it can be in your world and if it makes switching & operations easy yet interesting so be it. A multi-level layout with a helix would suggest a point to point configuration, possibly with an interchange at one end & your big yard at the other. In a two level layout, the starting & end points could conceivably be above & below each other. If this is what you build, it might help to locate the helix at a point where you might logically expand into the other half of the garage in the future. To that end, I'd suggest making the helix easily removable from the mainline. When you remove the partition, or a portion of it, you detach the helix, move it into the new space and extend the mainlines on both levels to reach its new location. This way, your expansion doesn't disturb your existing benchwork or scenery or disrupt the operation scheme you've perfected. You've only added distance & new opportunities to the run. I love planning! No wonder I hardly ever get anything built for myself. What I'd give for that space. The Hummer would be out of there so fast it would make your head spin! Wayne
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