As someone pointed out, I’m getting $$$ from Microsoft every time the characters 4 x 8 pass through my Internet Explorer.[:D]
So, are you game? You can put your effort where your mouth is. The best ones I’ll post for postarity on my website.
The rules.
It has to be HO and fit on a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. You can build up or down as much as you want.
You can use any brand of track or flex or handlay.
18" minimum radius for Post 1920 non-geared locos. 15 inch minimum for geared and pre-1920 steam. #4 turnouts or greater. Grades should be 4% or less. In other words, it has to work.
All track should have a purpose and work for that purpose. If you have a siding or spur to service an industry, the industry should fit (or you need to show how to kitbash it to make it work.) There should be access roads to the industies (real or implied). Industries can also be implied–such as a coal conveyor coming from the other side of a hill.
You should have a plan for scenery ( at least describe how it works.) In other words, it has to be finishable.
Your layout can be railfan or operations-based or both.
You an post your plan on this or another site for comments to refine it. Post it here when you are ready to rumble.
You can put up things you’ve designed in the past.
At the end we will narrow it down to the top 5 through discussion among the contestants and post it for the general population for ranking.
How far out do you want the deadline? a week? two-weeks? a month? Any rules you want to change?
Concept 1: Take a 4x8 3/4" plywood panel, lay horizontal on two (2) saw-horses.
Paint light tan, cover panel with a copious even layer of screened sand, then make several mounds/dunes of sand, add a few rock outcroppings.
Add some garage-sale quality beat up flextrack, half buried in the sand.
Then add some beat up, derailed European steam loco & crappy passenger cars, and finally some model figures, dressed in arab garb, but really depiciting Lawrence of Arabia & his men.
Concept 2: Buy the new Walther’s Milwaukee terminal + associated support buildings - arrange on 4x8 panel, add some flex track & ballast & detail parts - and that’s about all you’ll have room for…
Of course, the toughest part of either one will be getting a 3-D looking flat backdrop which has good prespective no matter what angle you view it from…[:P]
Disclosure - I had a 4x8 ‘plywood special’ layout for many years, it was an oval gussied up from some Atlas track plan book of year’s past, and it was… operationally rather boring. Even designing a tight switching layout (I’m thinking of the Raritan Central in Edison, NJ, but RMC is running a series on the Modesto in California) is best with track/structures over several fingers/pennisulars rather than one big table with a PITA-to-reach center.
Extra bonus question: that Atlas track plan book, I suppose it was from the early 1960s, had in the front a cartoon of some guy with a oval track gathering dust at his feet, sitting in an easy chair leering over some girlie magazine - anyone remember the of that track plan book? I ask not for the cartoon, but for the last track plan which was the very stunning definition of Spaghetti-bowl track planning - I think the multiple loops of track in the center of the plan were even located in a pseudo-valle
Very vaguely, from that period, I recall a John Armstrong layout based on the Bingham Canyon copper mine (which had not yet gone to truck haulage.) The center of the layout was the main pit - a moon crater with a ‘main track’ spiraling to the bottom and loading spurs here and there all the way down. I wonder if that’s the layout that found its way into that book. More than a few of the layout books put out by track manufacturers over the years have been full of John Armstrong designs, acknowledged in the fine print next to the copyright date (or not at all.)
I agree that with an N scale 4x8 you can get almost four times the railroading in an equivalent space compared to HO and have broad curves and much less compression of scenery. Although there is some steam available and the equipment has vastly improved in the last thirty years, those of us who have an interest in modeling older small branchlines with small steam locos and older rolling stock would be severely challenged as there is very little available. For contempory railroading, a 4x8 in N scale is just the ticket.
Train comes off the staging onto the layout. Goes onto the curvbe and into the tunnel. Pops out under the road bridge in the town of becket. Station in becket etc. I built it modern era but all industries can be changed. They do work in Becket, Shove a few cars up towards the industry in Becket Falls, heads south and reassembles train. Does a few laps and eventually ends up back in staging.
Operational based with Lots of varied Scenery and a loop for breaking in locos, and continuous running.
Not quite so. Check on Athearn’s re-release of the MDC old-time stuff. There’s tons. Boxcars, reefers, stock cars, coaches (long and short), cabeese, all with truss rods and finely detailed. They also have some of the finest-running N scale steam engines, the old-time 2-8-0 and 2-6-0.
Other options on steam include the Bachmann 2-8-0 and Model Power 4-4-0 and 2-6-0. Bachmann has announced that they’re doing their M&PA ten-wheeler in N soon too.
I was actually considering doing an N scale 1910-era Colorado Midland using that stuff. I could probably do the Leadville to Hagermann Pass segment on a 4x8.
Extra bonus question: that Atlas track plan book, I suppose it was from the early 1960s, had in the front a cartoon of some guy with a oval track gathering dust at his feet, sitting in an easy chair leering over some girlie magazine - anyone remember the of that track plan book? I ask not for the cartoon, but for the last track plan which was the very stunning definition of Spaghetti-bowl track planning - I think the multiple loops of track in the center of the plan were even located in a pseudo-valley - I’d love to see that plan once again to see if my memory is correct or not…
Eeh! H-ow O-rdinary, I was gonna give it a whirl in G [:P], but since this is a private party, I’ll just say ‘Bah humbug’ and go back to my workbench! [;)]
Ah, dang, my memory was wrong…I would have sworn that layout had more track, and even a pond+dam in the middle. Oh well.
Using that link and moving through the layouts, I found mine was 10014 - Improving the Simple Oval which apparently was in a totally different book altogether (HO Layouts for every Space). I had the Tyco Pipe Unloader on the switchback, the Revel Enginehouse on the end of the left side spur which approaches the double track section, and of course the mandatory Revel Passenger Station on the lower right, before the enginehouse spur. That was when Model Railroading Was Fun, my friends…[(-D]
Maybe the Spaghetti Bowl one I was thinking of was this one 10023 - Folded Dog-Bone, with 5 thru tracks in a row at one point (not a yard) - too bad the schematics on that Atlas site don’t include the original artwork. Pretty sad that I remembered the silly guy reading girly mag cartoon…
Cool link by the way, good to see the ol’-skool HO layouts of the past…
There is nothing wrong with your memory. The one you are thinking of the with pond & dam is from the book Custom-Line Layouts HO Scale Railroads by John Armstrong. You are talking about the first edition published in 1957 with a black cover. The track plan you are speaking of is the second to last in the book, #18, and is called “The Big PanHandle”. That is on pages 36 and 37. This plan was dropped from the book somewhere along the line. My copy of a later edition of the same book does not have it; neither has Atlas reproduced it for their on-line gallary of track plans.
It is a great plan for someone with a very limited amount of space who wants a real yard and to run multiple trains for some distance simultaniously. It is a terrible plan for people who enjoy way freights and switching, as there is only one industry. The pond and dam is a mill-pond for that industry. It is NOT a 4x8.
Hey, maximum utilization of scarce space! [:P] When you look at them from this distance, you just try to figure out what they were thinking - 1 car spurs jutting out here and there, 5 tracks right next to each other (yeah, I know you could find this in a few prototype places, mostly when 2 or more railroads shared the same ROW, but still), curves and double backs, and best of all no backdrops or scene blockers - it was perfectly toy-like because these layouts were NOT representations of tight terminal district trackage (e.g. the famed circular CNJ freighthouse/float terminal in the Bronx), but were instead suppose to represent an average town/area, with 5 tracks looping around to serve the 2 or 3 industries (+ 2 passenger stations, one on each end of the loop). I know that Atlas et. al. wanted to sell lots of that quality Code 100 Steel Track (forget Brass, Steel!), but still less can really be more…
OK everyone, vote for your favorite Atlas 4x8 track plan, we’ll put some industries on the winner, and present that to Space Mouse as a group-effort entry! It’ll be a cinch to win! [:P]
Yeah, I know that layout too. I intend to build it some day (one of the few from that book that I have not).
That layout was made from a prototypical scenario called the “Non-branching branch”. In real life the branch paralleled the double track main, just like the model layout does. It was written up in the April 1957 issue of Model Railroader. The Atlas plan was an adaptation using their snap track of that original. Two of the track which you say are 5-in-a-row are not. There are three layers of track and two (the top most and bottom most) of the tracks at that point are hidden.
One interesting point that I see in all of this is the growth and evolution of John Armstrong’s thinking over the years. If I am not mistaken, a lot of these spaghetti bowls are at least to some degree his. Yet by the time Track Planning For Realistic Operation came about the less is more idea was clearly forming. And I think this evolved even further in his later designs. It would be an interesting study.
