Hmmm. Let’s go back into ancient history:
When I was four or five, my dad and I had an HO layout on a 4’x4’ sheet of plywood. It was a simple folded oval using the traditional sectional track, open-girder bridge, and plastic trestles. We tried using papier mache to build up under the trestles, but it didn’t work well.
When I was about 9 or 10, I got a pre-made layout as a Christmas gift. It was molded foam, pre-colored, with the same up-and-around plan as before. Some lighter foam served as the roadbed. It came with buildings, and a Conrail F9 engine and some cars. It was destroyed by my 5-years-younger sister in a fit of jealousy by her poking holes all across it, and bending up the track.
When I was in college, my mom’s boyfriend got out of the N-scale stuff he had, and gave it all to me. This was just track, but I got a 4x4 plywood sheet and laid down some simple loop-with-passing siding stuff, and had fun with it for a while.
Later, I took off all the track, and re-cut the plywood to make a hexagon shape, and put a folded-figure eight on there, with some spurs. I did it using cork roadbed, and had painted the plywood brown, and actually applied ballast. But, scenery was a challenge, and starting with a flat sheet of plywood didn’t make for much interest. This layout moved with us from Iowa to Minnesota, where is stayed dormant until my son saw it and prompted me to rework it.
The story of that rework is in another thread (see the link in my signature). But using the same hexagon shape, we did a simple loop of track in order to make it easy for my son to play with the trains, and to spend time doing the scenicking that I hadn’t really figured out before. That’s progressing nicely.
Recently, I acquired two cast-off HO layouts on rectangular plywood sheets, one 3’4"x5’ and the other 4’x6’. I’m looking at bolting these together and trying the Woodland Scenics subterrain system for scenery on it. This won’t be a simple loop, but have som