MR Mar 2002 Article: Designing a layout to fit your DINKY SPACE!

[BRJN]

QUOTE: Originally posted by GMTRacing

Hopefully i will be able to do both point to point and at least one main line loop with scenery and grades, but how does one draw the line, and how do you avoid looking like 5 qts in a 4 qt tin?

I am not a professional at this, but you could try designing a continuous loop with a 'division-point' facility in it. A branch line runs out of the division point and goes around the room (maybe above the loop or maybe in front of it) to its endpoint destination, maybe half-way around. The continuous loop could be hidden behind hills or under a tunnel or behind buildings where the branch is supposed to occupy attention. The other half of the room (where there is no branch) you can have the loop be the main thing to see.

[ukguy]

cmrproducts, do you have a website or photos online of your layout that I could view. I would be very interested to see it.

Have fun & be safe
Karl.

[GMTRacing]

Spacemouse,
You are talking about what i'm trying to do now. My first attempt was too small and after several delicate negotiations , i acquired the rights to my present 12' x 12' location. I alreaady had a table and a fair bit of track and now I'm going through existing plans and seeing what i want to feature. Hopefully i will be able to do both point to point and at least one main line loop with scenery and grades, but how does one draw the line, and how do you avoid looking like 5 qts in a 4 qt tin? I'm now 6 revisions into a 100 page graph paper sketch pad, no one has enough room for real scale distances,probably not even the switch yard only layouts. How do plan to do this yourself? J.R.
he who has never made a mistake has never made much

[robengland]

Spacemouse

amazing how time and mony estimates look when you really pin them down, whether managing IT projects, house renovations or MR layouts. May I suggest you never refine the estimates you have already made [:O]

As for your technique, I think it would be a good one for designing a biggish home layout. For small ones, I think the reality constraints soon chop so much away that it wouldn't gain you much over just listing a few bullet points. But it would be a fine armchair exercise anyway [:D]

[SpaceMouse]

I'm thinking 3 years maybe for my 20x12 mid-size basement layout. Maybe $1200 for lumber, a Zepher, track and tortoises. I have plenty (I almost said enough) rolling stock and engines.

I could not conceive of actually doing a warehouse layout.

[BRJN]

A few weeks ago I got to go on 'remote assignment' at work - I was running a project to repack/relabel some product into the new numbering system. (My employer makes plastic plates, lids, to-go containers, and such.) The product was in a storage warehouse with a ceiling about three stories above the floor, rooms easily 150 ft square.

I was mentally filling the space with visions of the Smoky Mountains in HO scale ... and A LOT of plaster gauze ... or a version of the Grand Rapids & Indiana that was only SLIGHTLY condensed between towns (This would be laid out on the ultimate snake-shelf peninsula layout). I had thought about an around-the-room spiral but I would have to provide remote controls for every train, and aisle space for two forklifts to pass each other.

At this point a bit of reality began to set in: I work for an employer that cannot afford to buy itself enough forklifts, let alone pay me enough to buy a bunch of forklifts for my own. [:o)]

This is far too big for anybody's $$$ (except maybe a government project). The Smoky Mountains can be painted or photographed onto the backdrop. And most of the GR&I layout would have farm fields (and a loosely parallel highway) as scenery anyway. So this probably ought to be condensed into a profitable thought experiment. A regular bedroom - or even a master bedroom - is big enough to get the real nuggets you want for the flavor.

[Anonymous]

When I sat out to design my layout, I measured off the space it was going to occupy, then sat down and started drawing up my plans-several of them. Well, I could have done this, or I could have done that, or I could just start all over again until I found something that rang my bell. Finally I came up with a design that gave me the most bang for my buck, plus I could change the buildings, automobiles and trains around and do a little time traveling to give me some variety which made it even better.

I'm divorced, and not likely to ever be married again, so I can do, buy, etc anything I want to without having to answer to anybody but my bank account, and that's the way I like it!.
Just thought I'd throw that in for the poor fellas that mentioned how married life hampers their hobbies...

trainluver1

[Jetrock]

Actually, spacemouse, I think Bikerdad is referring to John Armstrong, who wrote "Track Planning for Realistic Operation."

My layout puttered around in the idea phase for a long, long time, and is designed with expandability and adaptablity in mind--each section is sectional. Not every section will interface with every other section, but the idea is that as many as possible will interface. If I move into a larger space, I will probably be able to expand beyond my current "one city only" layout concept--there are other spots on the SN I would like to model beyond the Sacramento city limits, but for now they are sufficient.

I worked out this idea, and some of the module ideas I still have, using a similar mechanism--I looked at the entirety of the Sacramento Northern (well, not physically, but via maps and photographs) and decided what interested me most. An article in an old MR mirrored the concept: rather than model the whole 180+ miles of the line, it suggested a layout built around key scenes: the yard at 40th and Shafter in Oakland, the ferry at Suisun Bay, the Lisbon Trestle, the Sacramento union station, the Woodland wye/station, the Chico shops, etcetera. A modeler could pick and choose their preferred portions and arrange them how they wanted.

For a while last spring I made a half-hearted attempt to start a modular railroad club based around building standardized modules based on parts of the SN route, to be "mixed and matched" in this form. The nice thing about a modular approach like this is that flexibility and expandability are definitely there--however, it does help if one is modeling flat terrain. Mountain scenery and layouts based around sweeping vistas wouldn't do well in such a context.

[Anonymous]

My experiences mirror dacourt's.

Small space means you will have to accept compromises that you wouldn't in a larger space. A small space also means you can pretty much forget having long runs between switching points of interest.

My only available space currently is 9' 7" x 12' 10" (visible around-the-walls shelves) and a 9' 7" x 24" closet. Compromise will be the order of the day, that, and accepting some things it simply won't do and avoid frustrating myself trying.

Given that I'm in the same "dinky space" boat, I decided to chunk 30 years worth of love for mountain railroading and accepting what my space can do and going with that. (Early pencil doodling indicates it can possibly do it surprisingly well.)

However, seeing as I'm VERY early-on in the process, it remains to be seen whether or not I'm successful!

Andre

[SpaceMouse]

B dad.

Is that John Allen or John Anderson?

I wasn't suggesting that the techique would be easy, and as you suggest, not all of us could pull it off. But if you could, wouldn't your layout profit?

[Bikerdad]

Spacemouse,

What you're describing is an extreme, disciplined case of defining one's druthers, with humble respect to John A. It is, perhaps, one of the most challenging tasks of layout design (which goes beyond trackplanning), because few of us have the talent for specific dreaming without constraint. Generalize dreaming without constraint is easy, specific planning with constraint is easy. Specific planning without constraint is also very tough, because plans have to account for "what is, or is likely", and that means constraints, or it stretches our reality window.

I think the other challenge to the Dreaming Druthers Railroad is it demands more knowledge of what we actually want, of what we like and don't like, than those of us who aren't very experienced with MRR may have. I may THINK that I'd like to do a lot of switching, but without ever having done it, I can't be sure. Ditto with putting running water on my layout, or a trolley system going through the urban area, or a radio controlled mobile train ferry to transfer trains from one side of the layout to the other, a la the Great Lakes ferries.

So, I think that there is great value in defining your druthers as best as you can, but also caution that spending an inordinate amount of time designing the dream layout can, of course, prevent one from actually building any layout.

[TurboOne]

Yup, but not cause I wanted, but time, $$ and kids, and wife all get a sayso.

They have smaller ideas then me. They help keep me balanced.

How is the hogwarts etc...coming ????

Nothing new at my end, maybe this weekend.

Tim

[SpaceMouse]

Tim,

In essense you did what I was describing. You built the basement layout in your head, you distilled what was impportant, and now you are building your ideal layout.

[TurboOne]

Chip, I wanted the big monster layout with no restrictions. For about a day. The garden forum told of the horror of HO outdoors, even in SoCal. Then I saw the costs that now come with the hobby. Took care of that outdoor HO layout with unlimited size.

Built the 4 x 8 but thats too small for the engines I like.

Thanks to Randy R, I will have a 14 x 8, big curves for the big engines, and a space for carnival rides. I will use mountains to seperate town from carnival on the layout. I am using ideas I have seen on the forum to figure out how to put multiscenes on same layout. While my wife thinks 14 x 8 is huge, I just show her pics of other layouts, and tell her about their dollars. Then life is good, and I get to build.

While many think 14 x 8 is big, I still have the grandious ideas so I am having to watch what I really want, and build what fits.

Tim

[SpaceMouse]

Thanks Jetrock for actually reading the post.

By no means was I implying that a person design a layout that covered the North American railway system. What I was suggesting was designing an ideal layout without the limitations of space. Your ideal layout may be a basement size, it may be a warehouse size, or much smaller. Your ideal is your ideal. No one but you can define it. For this exercise, it should not be defined by availible space.

Dacort,

What you are describing is what I was describing, only instead of starting with the space, you start with the dream. The idea is to give you more options and help with defining what is important. You still have to compromise, you just have more to start from.

It is kind of like writng good poetry. You start with a lot of good images. Then you pare and refine until you distill the essense of what you are creating.

[dacort]

I have a relatively small space (10x10 room plus 2x4 closet). I think the trick is to make a list of all the stuff that's really important to you, then all the stuff that you are willing to compromise on, and the stuff you're willing to do without. You can't put everything under the sun on a small layout. There just isn't room, so you have to try to put in as much of what you do want as possible.

I model in HO. For me I wanted the ability to run trains of about 12-14 cars, some industrial switching, a 30" minimum radius on the mainline, at least one area where scenery could dominate, and staging so I had somewhere to park trains. I did not include a classification yard, engine terminal, etc. I chose to live with a duckunder so I could have continuous running, as I did not want just a switching layout.

What I ended up with is basically a twice around double track oval, which is a scenic compromise, but it gives a longer run. I did not attempt to model any specific places, trying instead to create a plausible generic setting where I could run trains in a hopefully somewhat realistic fashion. Operation so far consists of through trains, a local to work a small industrial area, and a plant switcher to handle my grain mill. I run the layout by myself mostly.

It's not a perfect plan, but it does most of what I want in the space I have, so I am satisfied. I drew a lot of ideas on paper before I settled on what I have.

[Jetrock]

In many ways the idealized basementless layout would be a true-scale representation of the railroad you want to model. Obviously there are problems with this approach: what if you only want to model a small part of that railroad, or several small parts?

When modeling a prototype, maps showing where the railroad actually ran are a good start for such a thought experiment. If the object of this experiment is to end up with a model railroad track plan, one must begin the process of prioritizing which parts of that railroad you wi***o model the most. Obviously, the closer you are to freelancing, the more you can mix and match parts of a railroad--if you are attempting to be representational, you can pick several key scenes (those Layout Design Elements) to model and build the layout around those scenes.

If you are freelancing, then such a project would benefit from a little real-railroad research. Obviously if you don't know what a railraod does or how it runs, it would be more difficult to design a railroad from scratch that makes any sense.

Another factor is size--modeling an industrial switching yard in such an experiment would be much easier than mapping out the whole Union Pacific or BNSF systems! Some idea of your "givens & druthers" (what this experiment will include, what area it covers) are necessary before starting such an experiment.

One argument in favor of software-based train sims is that you CAN design layouts that are many miles long--the limitations become RAM and hard drive space, which are generally cheaper than basement space!

[Anonymous]

Interesting replies about wives, etc. above. Often times I wish I had more time for my hobbies. But I do know the couple times I've been single in my life (I'm now married), I didn't want to cudle up to an Athearn SD40.

I always seemed to abandon my hobbies when I didn't have a girlfriend. Now that I'm married, I'm settling back into my hobbies again. It's almost as if I only enjoy my hobbies only after the rest of my life is in balance.

Funny how that works.

Ideal layout size for the "dream layout": one spare bedroom. Any more than that would become way too much work for me. I'm hoping to build that spare bedroom layout when I retire in 30 years.

As for now, still in the planning stages for my small 2ft x 8ft switching layout. Plenty big for me at this time in my life.

[tstage]

Chip,

I asked somewhat the same question a few months ago. I asked folks what their ideal basement dimensions would be. Some shot for the moon, while others were more down to earth.

Tom

[SpaceMouse]

(sigh)

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by davekelly

...Of course the idea of palnning the house around the layout is way way cool...

That is exactly what Rick Rideout, owner of Rix Products, had done. He designed his dream layout, then wondered what the house would look like so he and his wife designed the house ( 35' x 110' ) around the layout and had it built.
If you can get your hands on Allen Keller's sold out video #9, grab it. It's about Rideouts L&N layout. Also featured in the September 1991Model Railroader Magazine
Photo tour of Rick Rideouts L&N Henderson Subdivision

[cmrproducts]

Well I must be lucky as I HAVE that big dream layout. I have 1000 ft of mainline and over 2600 ft of track total. I am doing the Conrail Lowgrade from East Brady (Phillipston) to Driftwood. I have laid out the towns using the CR ZTS maps as prototypically as possible within the constraints of the room.

And NO it is not a maintenance monster! I learned from many years of building layouts (about 20) at the Clarion Club and for others how to build a layout that runs forever and has almost ZERO maintenance.

And as for track cleaning, I DON’T DO ANY! Yes I have found a way to NOT have to clean track! When you have 2600 ft of track it is not something you want to do. So I finally found a way.

Metal Poli***he rails. Any other method is only a waste of time, only because you have to keep doing it over and over. I have tried all of the others! This includes Wahl Hair Clipper oil, and all of the cleaners. (If you want I can provide a list of the fluids I have tried)

I can go down to the basement anytime I want and fire up the BLI sound engines and away they go. No stalling and no sound cutouts! It has been over a year since I did any cleaning of the rails and this was only because I spilled some paint on them doing some backdrops. And NO I do not have all of my car wheels converted to metal (800 plus cars). So that blows that theory out of the water about the plastic wheels causing dirty track problems. (Although I am going to change the all of the wheels over to metal as they roll much better).

I have written an article on building a low maintenance layout and I can e-mail it out if some wi***o find out how it is done. It goes against a lot of so called current methods but just ask the operators when I have my OP Till U Drop sessions and have over 20 plus trains running on the layout at one time. It just keeps on running. And I am glad I spent the time to build it right!

BOB H Clarion, PA

[SpaceMouse]

Did any one actraully read my post or did you just read the frist sentence and create a response?

This isn't a post about creating a monstor layout. It is a post about a creatinve planning technique for creating the best possible layout for the space availible.

(sigh)

[Fergmiester]

QUOTE: Originally posted by SpaceMouse

When I read that title in the March 2002 MR, I thought, "Wow! What a great technique for layout planning!" I eagerly read only to be disappointed. The article was about putting together an aerial photo from composit shots.

The March edition, the one that comes out before April 1st!

Personally If I didn't have walls, kids and a Wife, CN would be outta business as I would double track the mainline between here and Upper Canada and forget about Montreal.

As for the cold, dress accordingly

Fergie

[Anonymous]

Bigger isn't always better. With a BIG layout you NEED others to run it. Is this what you want? A guy in our club has a large layout, the mainline is around 325 feet long, wraps around the basement three times on its way from one point to the other. Of course he's never been married, so the house is all his!

He has operating sessions every three weeks and all kinds of guys show up, there must have been around 20 last week. Really hard to get around others at times when following your train. He sort of zips around keeping everything running more or less smoothly, and seems to enjoy himself. But this is not what I personally would want if I had a home layout (I have three pairs of HO scale modules - stacked and stored most of the time).

And there's the maintenance aspect - cleaning track, making sure all of the electrics and turnouts work properly, maintaining the rolling stock, etc. Sounds more like a job than a pleasurable hobby!

BIG isn't always better! [:D]

Bob Boudreau
Here's his Island Central Railway site: http://www.geocities.com/islandcentral/

[davekelly]

Hmmmm. This is kind of related to one of Tony Koesters columns when he wrote about being 100 percent prototypically correct. Imagine a layout where the distance between towns were a scale 30 miles apart. That could easily take 45 minutes of travel. I guess you could always switch one town, head out to the next, get lunch, take a shower and then switch the second.

Of course the idea of palnning the house around the layout is way way cool. Come on Lotto - Daddy wants a bigger layout!!!!"

[twhite]

Originally posted by Don Gibson

CP DIDN'T double track their mainline Oakland - Promotory Point. so why should you?

Don--because I don't want my Eastbound crews stuck out in the middle of nowhere (Nevada) waiting for a Westbound. It makes them grumpy.
Tom[:D]

Tom View my layout photos! http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm310/TWhite-014/Rio%20Grande%20Yuba%20River%20Sub One can NEVER have too many Articulateds!

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