First time post & nervous as H&*%. Here goes. Am 61 yrs. young & think I would like to build a layout after being absent from model RR for over 45 years. Crazy huh? Well anyway what I would really enjoy is to make a layout of the D&H yard in Saratoga Springs, NY. This is the place where my grandfather worked as a mechanic for most of his adult life. Roughly from the end of WWI until approximately 1958. I have no clue where or how to begin. All I know for sure is it would be in HO scale & the layout will be 5’-4" X 12’. Forgot to mention I have nothing, nada, “O” as far as pieces needed for a train layout. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hey Vince welcome to the forums! You came to the right place to ask questions as we have a lot of very good layout designers.
Ask about and look around. One of the guys here with a great beginners tutorial is Spacemouse. Good luck and remember, we all started with nothing! I am still working with what I started with,nothing!
Looks like you’ll need to do some selective compression to get the main features of the yard onto your layout. Decide which features are important to you and sketch out a plan to fit your space. You’ll probably end up doing this several times as you find out what fits and what doesn’t. Then you can translate your sketches into a track plan.
Once you have a track plan, you can determine what track pieces you’ll need. After that, it’s a matter of laying out your plan and making sure everything fits before you start glueing things down.
A word of caution. You’ve specified a layout size of 5’4" x 12’. Any way you look at it, you’re going to have a long reach to get to the middle of the layout. And you’ll have to use some small radius curves that could be problematic in HO scale. Where is this layout going to be built? Basement? Spare room? If it’s at all possible, you might consider building a layout around the walls of a room rather than as a stand alone layout. Just something to consider if it’s possib
Where do you live Vince? There are number of hooby shops in the Capital District that carry a fair amount of D&H Equipment.
Also you didn’t indicate a scale. I’d suggest HO no matter what. My reasons? (1) excellent selection of equipment both new and second hand (Ebay). I just started my stepdad (73) on his layout and he dithered back and forth between HO and N. He wanted to go with N for long trains but after trying to he went back to HO (where I started him) because the N was too small to work with.
There are also a number of excellent books on the D&H with great pictures.
Sounds like you have a great starting point. Make the Saratoga yard your center piece and dispatch trains North to Montreal and South to Albany. However I would point out tthat the Saratoga Yard was nowehere near as important as Colonie/Mechanicsville for the D&H so you may want to consider moving a little south to get more variety of action.
First, welcome to the forums and back to model railroading. Next, READ! Go to your local hobby shop, train show or intenet store and get books on benchwork, scenery, electronics. operations and any other topic you think will be helpful. The hobby has changed dramatically since you were last in it. I didn’t have much of a layout in the 60’s and am just getting into the early stages of a “dream layout.”
After you have aquainted yourself with some of the new ideas, you are in the right place to ask questions. There are many folks here, willing to give you answers, sometimes in overwhelming numbers. If you can find a train show in your area, go to it, get aquainted with some of the people showing off their layouts. Find a club, even if you are not a club type person, they are often willing to show you some of what they have done, without asking you to join. To find clubs or events, go to the top of this page to RESOURCES, then drop down to Model RR Groups and Coming Events.
Again, welcome back to the hobby and remember to have fun, that’s what this hobby is all about. Don’t worry about being perfect the first time, your skills will improve and you can go back and redo the areas where you started.
If you have access to it, Jim Shaughnessy’s Delaware & Hudson is a great reference. I have Thunder & Lighting Stripes and D&H Passenger and Frieght Car Color Guide too. Both are too modern for you, but well worth it for later eras.
The big problem is a lack of accurate D&H steam locomotives. Atlas has produced, Alco S2s, S4s, RS3s, RS11s. Proto 1000 made RS2s, and RS11s.
Unfortunately, both my favorite beginner MR books are out of print…Dave Frary’s The Pennsy Middle Division in HO Scale and Lou Sassi’s A Realistic HO Layout for Beginners.
Chip Engelmann’s talking about all his mistakes as a newbie: http://www.chipengelmann.com/ and why you should design your own RR, beside having a nice introduction to staging.
UPDATE! Change of plans somewhat. When it happens the layout will be in the basement. There is fortunately more than enough room to make it as big as I need to, within reason of course. I have planned for some time to build an addition on the garage to to move my woodworking equipment which is currently in the basement. That will free the basement for more than enough room for a RR layout. It will take a while so I guess the first thing is thank all you fine people who jumped in & gave me advice. Thank you all very much & may all of you have a safe & happy holiday season.
First and foremost if you do a shelf type layout you can start in Albany and finish in Montreal and have the Saratoga Yard to boot.
You can go about it two ways. If the basement is finished (highly recommended! if not finish the space before you start on the trains) you can do a 2 ft shelf around the walls of the room which allows you to put your scenes in the correct order and only have to run through them once.
If you don’t want to attach to the walls or if you’d like the ability to run the trains and just sit back and watch them go then you can build a table top layout in the shape of a ginat oval with a scenic divider in between (in effect spliting the table into “2” 2ft x 8ft sections).
Still the best thing you can do is post a drawing of the space you will get and try to find out which trains were run around Saratoga and what happened in SP-yards.