Ceiling layouts

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

I'm putting up a ceiling layout (Marklin HO) in my home office and wanted to see if anyone out there had interesting suggestions.

What I'm currently planning is a basic single loop around the ceiling. The track will probably be about 12 inches down from the ceiling (just above doors) and I'm planning on the shelf for the track being about 12 inches out from the wall. My thought is that with 12 inches of width, I have room for a turnout on all 4 sides of the room and some room to place some scenery.

I'm sure some folks out there have done a few neat things with this type of set up. Any creative ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Visual aspects that turned out really well? Visual aspects that were not as nice as you had thought? Anything is helpful.

Thanks,
Dean

[Anonymous]

An idea that I have never been able to carry out is to take a situation like yours (tracks above head height) and maximize it by taking those tracks across a big steel bridge, the kind with a see-through deck, so that you watch the trains cross it from under the bridge. I had conceived a great big steel arch bridge as a sort of duckunder, but I'm sure you could find a prototype with a flat bottom, so that you could run it across the door head and still have the door swing under it. A big through-truss bridge, with all sorts of rivets and lacework, or even something like the magnificent Firth-of-Forth bridge in Scotland, would be an amazing centerpiece of an otherwise compromised layout design.