How do you keep the cat from jumping up on the layout? My problem is my bed is in the same room as the train layout.
that is know as mission impossible if cat is going to be able to come in room. Cats are naturally curious and like high places.
You can try spraying cat with water from a water bottle or squirt gun but then normally you just get the cat jittery when your around and its on the table and it may break something when trying to get away.
I plan to have my trains in another room. although at times I will set them up on the floor and they like to watch them.
good luck not sure if the product that you see advertised usually at vets offices really work that good think its suppose to offend there smell but then the cat may never come in your room and it sounds like you want both.
I think rttraincollector is right. I moved my layout to the garage - the cat doesn’t go in there!
I don’t think she really hurt anything anyway, it’s just my layout increased in size. There were several pictures posted some time back of cats on layouts terrorizing Plasticville people.
wyomingscout
There really isn’t much of anything you can do. As rtraincollector says, cats are naturally curious and like high places. If the cat is going to be in the same room as the layout, nothing short of electrified barbed wire is going to keep him off.
The only real solution – and I know you don’t want to hear this – is to have the layout in a separate room and keep the door closed to the cat at all times. Yes, there are sprays that supposedly repel cats, but take it from someone with eight cats, they don’t work worth a… Well, they don’t work.
If you don’t have another room (maybe you’re in a small apartment?), then there’s no way out but to find a place that has one. Cats are fascinated by raised platforms, and nothing we can do will change that. I’ve never known a cat to cause trouble with a floor layout (when the trains are moving, they’ll watch them; otherwise, they just ignore them), but a proper elevated platform-style layout is pretty much irresistible.
When I was a kid, our cat would always crawl up on our Christmas train platform and go to sleep under the tree. She never harmed anything, but had it been a permanent layout, the cat-hair problem would have become serious eventually.
I have 2 cats and one or the other is always on the layout sleeping in one of the tunnels. I have emergency pop up holes under the layout to retreave any cars that may be in a tunnel from the end of a train that have been knocked off track. The cats will either crawl in the tunnels through a portal or sometimes up through one of the pop up holes. They have yet to break anything on the layout in 5 years.
Boyd,
When you get a good answer, let me know.
My layout is in the basement, and my cat was constantly jumping up onto it (36" height, so no problem for Gracie). Three times, I had to replace a plowed farm field because she liked to lay on it and it would come up off the layout as she got up. When she started chewing the telephone poles, I banned her from the basement. She loves being in the basement, so I need some way to keep her off the layout. I have looked at rollup screens as a possibility but it is too expensive.
Rich
Sprinkle a little powdered cayanne pepper around the layout where it jumps up, sits or sleeps. Cats have very sensitive smell and the cayanne pepper is not one of their favorite scents, they will sniff it and be put off by it and will stay off the layout to avoid it and It does not harm them.
you just need to have a little talk with him
Yo Spanky don’t look now buttttttt
That’s the thing you gotta be concerned about.
Once the cat takes on the role of a hired assassin, all bet’s are off.
That has got to be one of the funniest pix I’ve ever seen. I crack up everytime I see it. But I agree, once a cat goes rogue, fugetaboutit!
I second the hot pepper advice, works for dogs and the homeless too.
Yeah but you know your in trouble when they get on the train table and …
Since the other person living in this apartment is a major league packrat AND stores one room full of her elderly aunts stuff in the room next to bedroom/layout there is no other place to have a layout. I do have about 1/2 ton of papers to sort through in my office from a business I used to have. Once I get through that I possibly could turn my office back into a bedroom and even expand the layout some. Our first cat 3 years ago was mellow, very vocal and only jumped up on the bed. We lost him last april and got this young and very high strung tortoise shell calico. She is so high strung we absolutely won’t give her catnip. She goes in, on, over, under, behind, in front every anything in this apartment. She still doesn’t have a name. I have thought of: Trouble, Houdini, Escape artist, Sneaky. But for now we just call her “cat”.
That’s the problem, Boyd.
Once you give her a name, all of the trouble will stop and life will be good again. She is rebelling.
Rich
These passengers are about to have a bad day…
I like the photos of the cats by Spankybird and rtraincollector, a bit amusing, especially the cat with the gun.
Anyway keeping a cat off your layout is next to impossible!! I had to install a door in a hallway area to keep a cat off my layout about 6 years ago, when I lived in Stuart FL. With this layout, where I live now in WPB FL, I didn’t think about having a cat getting into the layout as there are doors seperating the train room and the cat, however the rooms are not totally finished upstairs as the walls don’t go all the way to the ceiling. So my cat found a way in at least four times, even after I took down some train display shelfs that I thought he was using to jump over with.
I talked to a vet. (pet doctor) and was told house cats can jump almost 6 feet from a standing position, maybe further in a straight line if they are running across a ditch.
Lee F.
Hi everyone,
I’m from the Garden Railways staff, but hubby has an O-gauge layout in our basement and we own three cats, one of whom loves to yank out trees by the dozen.
Because our basement doesn’t have any doors, we installed a CatStop. It’s a motion-activated unit that emits a high-pitched sound only the cats can hear. I hate to sound like a commercial, but it does work. It’s got a decent range, so when positioned in the far corner of the layout (4x8), the entire surface is protected. We’ve had it up long enough now that we don’t even need to have batteries in it all that often. They know “it’s” up there.
As for cost, I think it was around $50. Seems a little pricey, but add up the cost of the destroyed scenery and IMO it was worth it.
There is a solution that will work 100%. The electronic collar or ecollar.
It was first invented about 40 years ago for/by hunters who needed a reliable recall for their field dogs since the dogs would often get out of either the sound of their voice or/and out of the line of sight. The ecollar works by providing an electric stimulus that acts like a tap on the dog’s shoulder and, when trained properly, is the dog’s signal to go back and find his owner. It’s use was also employed to signal the dog to retrieve game. The owner/handler uses an RF transmitting remote control while the dog wears a receiver collar.
The market and for the use of the ecollar for dogs was expanded for similar dog training exercises for the average dog owner. One use was to similarly provide for a reliable, off-leash recall of the dog and has become a sensible and humane tool to keep dogs safe…in the yard, out of the street, or away from dangerous situations when the dog is off leash. Another use was obedience training. It’s use was further expanded for use in military and law enforcement canine training.
Canine trainers and behavioralists discovered that reactive dogs previously deemed untrainable and/or dangerous responded very well to ecollar training. I use the word “reactive” because “aggressive” is not a totally accurate term. Many dogs react aggressively toward other animals because of a high prey drive, a matter of simple genetics. Most reactive dogs act aggressively towards other dogs and humans because of inadequate formative development/training.
Without adequate leadership and consistency from the
I’ll have to look into that CatStop product, I know someone who can use something like that.
Cats have been led to believe they own the trains. [(-D]
