Is there such a thing as stencils for use in Microsoft Visio, N and HO scales? I use Visio all the time and this would be an awesome way for me to accuratly design (to scale) my layouts. Are there free ones available? Thanks in advance.
They might exist somewhere, if not it wouldn’t be hard to make. But, what about flextrack?
Flextrack? You mean the stuff you lay down or is there a software program called Flextrack?
The track you lay down. I don’t see and easy way to deal with it in Visio, though I am not a expert. Someone was looking at this a couple months ago, I don’t remember the reult. You might try searching the forum for Visio. I also think that Google will find some G scale stencils.
General-purpose drawing programs like Visio may be useful for a general idea, but I have found they can be a challenge if one is trying to plan with precision. It is easy enough to come up with some templates for commonly-used track pieces, but getting proper alignments between components is tricky.
I designed a couple of layouts using an earlier version of Visio and also a couple with Powerpoint and they did not fit exactly as drawn, even though I took great care with the drawing. The biggest issue is in the alignments of components with connecting track and with other components, such as in a yard ladder. Fortunately, I knew there might be some issues like this going in, so I was conservative in my estimation of what would fit and it was possible to build the layouts in the available space – but again, I was extremely careful because I was designing for others to build.
If you are only designing one layout and aren’t trying to fit too much into the space, the imprecision may not be an issue. But I think many people would be better off with a model railroad CAD program, manual drawing templates, or scaled copies of actual trackwork.
Regards,
Byron
I have been using CadRail for as long as it has been available through numerous upgrades.
It has a library of most commercally available track components and one can even make templates of the turnouts, etc. that they use or design for themselves. It automatically does spiral easements and repetitive track spacing, yard ladders, any curve radiii, and so much more.
It is advertised in MRR frequently.