I am finishing my bench work and have a question. I plan on using foam for the decking, but what thickness and type do you guys recomend? Also with foam should I use corkboard under the tracks or just glue the track to the foam?
Everything will work. If you use 2 inch foam you have the opportunity to put small ditches and lakes right in the top. 1 inch will work if you have supports on 24 inch centers and little or no sub track scenery ideas. I always use road bed, except on some yard areas. The advantage in using roadbed everywhere is no problems with height transitions. I use WS foam roadbed, but anything will work.
Use any extruded foam, NOT WHITE BEAD BOARD. The pink, blue and green are all the same except in weight. If you get it at construction dump sites, take what they have. They can be mixed. If you buy it, get the lightest weight.
Good luck, this can be a fun part of making a private miniture world.
The thickness of the foam required depends on the intended vertical variation in your landscape. If your doing relatively flat terrain, 2 or even 1 inch thick foam should be more than addequate. If you’re doing mountains, well, you may want to consider cutting the foam so that you stack it up like a staircase to form your hillsides and do not waste so much foam with solid foam hills.
Definiely use some roadbed such as cork, homasote, or vinylbed. Trains running on the foam alone will be quite noisy.
I used the pink 1" foam. I laminated this to 1/4" luan plywood I had left over from another project to give the foam a little more stiffness and to provide something for screws to bite into should I decide to mount Tortise switch machines or the like underneath the layout at a later date.