For me, I looked at the designs and felt there weren’t any that liked that much more than the others although there were a few that I thought wouldn’t work at all. it was fairly complicated to look at the website and then write down those that I liked and then come back to this website and list my preferences. I think that waas reason you didn’t get more responses. - Nevin
Well, just to add my 50 ore (about 9 cents …) worth : maybe the focus was too much on voting and too little on actually discussing the advantages and the disadvantages of various solutions to various design problems ?
A random selection of useful tricks from some of the posted layouts:
- A asymmetric center divider gives you more space to curve around the center, as in “Du Bois and Punxzy”.
- You can have one line going diagonal corner to corner, and have a connection to another line that goes around the edge in at many different ways - two of which are a back-in (trailing) interchange spurs (ala Selkirk and Pacific), or a flyover type 225 degree (halfway between half circle and 3/4 cirle) curve joining them (ala Turkey Trail)
- Mixing normal gauge and narrow gauge can work well, if you have some vertical separation (ala Whisper River)
- Tucking in a couple of short interchange tracks in a corner, running the main off the curvede end of turnouts allows you to use corner space fairly efficiently. Same with using a turnout to take a spur off the end of a siding , or using Y turnouts to have two lines diverge very quickly, (ala own my Loopy Bridge and Terminal, building on an original idea by Linda Sand).
There were more ideas too. The reminder that there is a large difference between a track plan and a track plan with scenery drawn in. Look at e.g the RAT line plan - just the track plan looks overly ful
Well I’m new here and really don’t have alot to say. I liked the thought and was getting excited to see some layouts and hopefully give me some ideas of my own. When I got to the web site, all I could see was the thumbnails and not a blow up version. Oh well.
Being that it was my first experience in looking at a 4 X 8 competition, I thought it well done and very enlightening…The winner, by the way, was my first choice.
my .02 from the desert…
Try it again. The problem with some browser was fixed.
[:-^]
Space mouse can you tell me where the winners are from your contest ?? I can’t seem to find them even with a search.
Johnboy out…
Chip,BTW…I forgot to mention your 4x8 layout design contest was a good idea since many modelers still favor the 4x8 footer…
I really like entry #10.
Not many congrats so it fell off the front page quickly. http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/1284427/ShowPost.aspx
Brakie, this is only the second time we’ve completely agreed on something.
Mark
I’m with Vollmer. When you restricted it to HO, in my opinion you completely eliminated the single most effective way to put some truly innovative thought into a 4x8 space, that being, of course, the application of N scale.
There are a lot of N scale modelers out there, and when this kind of thing comes up, most of us just roll our eyes. Then we go back to other internet forums that don’t suffer as much from HO myopia.
In a nut shell, I didn’t participate because I didn’t get the idea that it was an “open” competition.
Personally, I think there’s a contingent of entrenched HO scalers who are afraid to admit that in a small space, N scale offers the possibility of a far superior model railroading experience.
Fortunately, I don’t suffer from such a “scalist” bias![:D]
Lee
wm:
No, that much is…clear…from your post. No biases at all.
Personally, I woudn’t have complained one bit if you had submitted a 2.2 x 4.4, or some O scaler a 7.25 x 14.5. That’s the kind of unbiased fellow I am. [:D]
Lee-
I think you might have just missed the point of the ‘contest’. It wasn’t to necessarily find the best use of the 4x8. It was more to find out what creative solutions there are for the folks that are dead set on building an HO scale 4x8, and there seem to be a lot of them. Chip, and others, have tried many times to discourage it, but that usually goes south. So he decided to go at the problem from the other direction, purposely limiting the parameters to a very specific problem. There is certainly room for a different contest with different parameters. It could be fun!
Lee,
What Jeff said.
I spend a lot of time in the Layout section and I sometimes feel that the most oft repeated phrase is “I only have room for a 4 x 8.” These people have fixated on the idea and they’ve fixated on their HO scale.
N scalers also have a fixation on the 30" door (now if you just build it in Z scale…). As I mentioned in the thread, think of it as a Haiku. The form is set. What can you do with it? That was the challenge. I’m sorry if you thought the rules excluded N-scalers. In my world there are lots of practical uses of those itty-bitty cute little trains. [;)]
(My future office will have an N-scale layout. I’ve been planning it for months. It will go around the room in a book case. Give the cats something to chase.)
Italics were a joke.
I understand the purpose of the parameters, but I don’t understand why an alternate scale wouldn’t be considered a “creative solution”.
Personally, I don’t have room for a 4x8, but if I did, I think I would take one of the more interesting (if that’s possible) HO layout designs and simply lay N scale track on the same footprint just to prove my theory that N scale offers the model railroader a better opportunity to model a railroad!
I’ll look forward to seeing what you do with the office layout… sounds like a neat idea. Just be careful with those cats, when they take over, next thing you know they’re abandoning miles of track and laying everyone off!
Lee
So you think!
That’s no theory.
That’s a FACT!
The contest was purposely constrained, to get very specific suggestions, for a very specific problem. Unless you can run HO trains on an N layout it isn’t a creative solution to that particular problem!
N-scale solution
My over all feeling about the contest was and still is a good feeling…for the first run.
My suggestions for any future contests of this nature would be to assign each layout entry a letter or number designation (layout A or layout #1) to eliminate confusion from incorrect spelling or failure of the voter to be clear on which layout was voted for (Loup Creek vs. Loopy Bridge).
Change the points awarded to one point per vote.
Perhaps run dual or triple contests at the same time to accomadate other scale entrys. Allow anyone to enter one or all of the contests. Have these all be 4X8 max size.
As stated before encourage discussion on what was the determining factor for the vote.
Even if the 4x8 footprint has been researched for the last 30, 40, or 50 years there are many of us (myself included) that have not seen many of them so while it may be old news to some it is new news to those of us that are just starting out.
Ken
That reminds me of the slot car tracks from the old sears catalog. I use to dream about having a race track like that. They were on the same page as the train sets.
Got some sauce for that spaghetti?