I am acquiring a rather large HO layout that I will have to move approximately 700 miles to my home. It can be separated into 7 sections, the largest being 4’ x 8’, with an approx. 2’ tall mountain in one corner.
Was thinking of flying up and renting a UHaul type truck, but was wondering if anyone has ever done this before, if you used a company (ex. UPS, etc) or moved yourself, and ANY suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!
Fly or drive up there, eyeball the railroad.
Strip out the rolling stock, buildings, bridges and try to save the switches, electronic controls etc. The locos too, if any.
Demo the rest.That means wood, plaster, wires, whatever.
Mail the salvaged item back to your place however you want it sent. Fly or drive back home and open your own boxes of stuff.
If you really MUST have the layout in it’s entirety. Chop it into door sized sections. Build a frame around each section. Stuff it all into a sufficently large Truck. Drive it back to your place.
Expect some crush damage, expect a stiff fuel bill. Expect other things.
Finally ask yourself this question. Does the room in your house large enough to fit the thing.
MODULAR LAYOUTs are designed to be moved, put together and taken apart when ready to move. My comments here dont apply to them.
Except perhaps how much truck you need and what it will take to feed and drink it and you until the whole thing gets back to your place.
Me? I would have it demo’ed and start a nice fresh layout right here at my place without the expense of the trip in the first place.
My layout is not portable, but is movable. If the time ever comes that I will move it rather than starting over, I will rent a 5 ton truck as the largest bench is 6’ x 18’. A $100.00 cost to move it isn’t much. The cheapest way for you would be to do the same. You would probably need a two day rental.
If you have a truck you may get away with renting a trailer. Just make darn sure you can get everything in. Good luck.
Brent
As Last Chance mentioned, be sure you have the floor space to use this layout without a lot of rebuilding. If you have to do a lot of re-aranging to make it fit, it probably is not worth preserving all of it. Save any scenic elements that are very good and scrap the rest. Save things like benchwork pieces (assuming they can be unscrewed easily), table legs, and other things that you might be able to use.
Assuming the track is something like flextrack, not hand laid, use a putty knife and scrape under the track to try to remove it from the roadbed. Soaking with water may losten the glue bond. You will still have to do a lot of cleaning ballast from the track (save that for when you get home). Do not save cork roadbed, it will just tear up if you try to remove it. Watch out for any wiring to turnout frogs. Remove switch machines.
Control panels are a tossup; if you are demolishing, they probably would be useless to you new design, but will contain toggle switches, pushbuttons, LEDs, etc, that could be salvaged. Cut them out and take home to strip them. (For all this work consider yourself “on the clock” and time is money to you. The quicker you get out of there, the better off you are. Work at home costs you nothing.)
Remove all buildings, vehicles, rollling stock, locos, etc and back in cardboard cartons with styro peanuts. Any building with fragile parts should be packed in individual plastic bags. Cut down trash bags work well as long as they are taped closed. That way if any parts break off, they will be in the bag, not lost in the box. If any locomotives or rolling stock still have the original box, pack them there.
OTHERWISE
Before you take a saw and wire cutters to the layout, take a hard look at where to cut. Plan your cuts to minimize the number of tracks that you cut and to minimize damage to scenic elements. Use a s
I’ve been building Phase 2 of my layout. It’s not portable, but I’ve been building it so that it wouldn’t be too impossible to move if necessary. I don’t plan to do that, but it’s not much harder to do it that way.
If this layout was built for disassembly, it shouldn’t be too hard. Take a look at the places where you’ll have to “break” the layout apart. How are the track joints? Did the builder plan ahead, and have track joints right on the breaks, or does the track run smoothly across? If there are no joiners, you’ll have to cut the track and re-join it later. The same goes for wire beneath the layout. Are there terminal blocks, with wires coming in to screw terminals from either side, or do the wires run from section to section? It’s not as bad as track, but there are usually a lot more wires. If you have to cut them, be sure to label each and every one.
I would then go to an appliance store and get a bunch of big refrigerator boxes. Cut them up and staple them to the underside of the layout. This will protect all the loose wires, and will cost almost nothing.
I’d remove all the structures, cars and even figures if possible. Hopefully, the builder used either no glue, or something like tacky glue for figures, so they won’t leave their feet behind as you remove them. Trees and other scenery are up to you. Most will probably sustain some damage, but not much. If there are a lot of nice, “specimen” trees, take them off and put them back later.
Finally, how is the access to both the old and new trainrooms? Garages are easy. Attics are tough. I could get my original 5x12 layout through the doors and out to the street with little trouble, but there’s no way it would go up the next flight of stairs. That 4x8 might seem like the biggest pieces, but a 5x5 section might actually be harder.&
First welcome and good luck with your project.
Is the layout built to be taken apart? Or can it just be taken apart? I could take my 174 square foot layout apart but it would take a saws all and a crowbar.
Do you have to take it apart, or will it be done before you get there?
Can the seller tell you how big each section is and how it comes apart and do they have tools you will need?
If they can tell you the sizes of each section with out the legs. I would call a local Home Depot and order 2 X 4 the sizes you need to build frames to hold each section so they can be stacked.
Is the seller going to help load the layout? Depending on how it was built, they can be very heavy. One section of my layout is 5 X 9.5 built of 2X4’s and 3/4 inch plywood and foam for the 2 foot tall mountain range. I would guess it weights in at around 300 pounds.
By the way, where are you picking it up from and where is it going? You might find some people from this site that could help. I would all so figure on taking 4 days.
Got any pictures you car to share, we like to look.
Cuda Ken
You state, that the layout you are about to acquire, can be dismantled into 7 segments. A layout, that has not been designed to be moved, will most likely suffer some damage by the move. To keep that at a minimum, you have to invest some time and effort. Go there, help dismantle the layout, so you will learn, how everything will fit together again. See, whether you can build a kind of crate around each segment, in order to protect scenery and structures. Enlist help to move the segments into the truck and later, to unload. Take off any loose items and securely pack them in crates or boxes. Do the move yourself, as you will exercise the necessary care. Any hired help will not do that!
A 4 by 8 with a 2` high scenery is quite chunky. Make sure you can move it out and into your home prior to buying the layout.
Reserve some extra $$$ for any repair, which is bound to come.
Personally, I would shy away from buying a layout, which is not truly portable, i.e. designed and built with a move in mind. The risk of not getting it together again is very high, so is the risk of severe damage.
In most cases, the results of such a move either end up as disappointing, or even disastrous. Moving a large, fragile, layout (all large layouts are fragile if moved a long distance) such a great distance is likely to result in a large part of it not surviving in a re-buildable condition. Think about what your home’s furniture might look like if the loading and transport were handled entirely by a few friends and yourself.
I speak from experience here, since my son-in-law is a subcontractor with United Van Lines and I regularly hear his horror stories about folks who attempted a do-it-yourself move involving large, or ungainly items. It’s usually a mistake folks don’t make twice. Unless professionally disassembled, packed up, padded and properly braced, to say nothing of reversing the whole process at the other end, the amount of damage incurred in a 700 mile, over the road move, is quite likely to render a large percentage of the layout worthless.
CNJ831
Over the road moves is one of the most… challenging. I have had entire loads vibrate and destruct by crush damage on roads with bad concrete in a few hundred miles. We called those rigs Freight shakers back then for a reason.
In the past as a child my brother had a layout that came out of the garage, stick it into a friend’s toyota pickup truck with instantly made it a over wide vehicle by a few feet and possibly over axle weight on the rear and to one side.
Nevertheless we got that thing to where it had to go. But it would not ever be in the shape it was when it left. It was leaving forever.
I demo’ed my own HO scale layout in a 12 by 8 foot space, it took me two days 20 hours to salvage the electronics, track and the main componets of the electrical wiring system. It took me about a week more to chainsaw and crowbar the stuff out. And another week to haul the lot to the dump downtown with my rig. And that was a small layout and we needed that room asap. It came out easily once I cut the special areas where I over engineered it during construction knowing that things are sort of crooked, weak and not exactly strong.
It would be a month before the room was made safe to use. So many small metallic parts, nails, bolts and what not made potential for injury great.
A year to construct and run trains properly without flaw and a month to tear it up and another month to make the room ready for something else.
Not to be negative or anything but that little demo taught me two things.
1- Don’t buy a layout anywhere ever.
2- If building one, make special areas a few inches wide on your benchwork where future chainsaw cuts can be made (And they will be made some day the way Life goes for most of us)
I have successfully moved two layouts. Each time I used a rental truck so the segments could be secured and out of the weather. All the suggestions and advice I’ve seen in the other posts apply - except for the “don’t do it” admonition.
I have three suggestions:
First, invest in several sizes of terminal strips (also called Jones barriers). By paring them with jumpers, you can disconnect wiring at the segment breaks and reconnect later with ease.
Second, the support legs can be shortened to a minimum by cutting them horizontally about a foot below the layout fascia. If you do one leg at a time, and provide a vedrtical support while cutting, you can easily shorten the legs to a movable length. All you need do is add a cleat or two to the cut legs to put them back together upon installatoin at the new location.
Third, if this is not already done, install carriage bolts at the segment breaks so you can bolt everything back together. ’
I’ll be happy to send you some illustrative photos if you care to view them. You are welcome to respond to chipmeriam@comcast.net.
chicochip
Just curious but do you have pictures or a link to pictures of this thing?
Let’s see what we’re talking about [;)]
Make sure that you can separate the benchwork into sections without hacking up any part of it. You need someone who actually knows how to load things into a truck so they don’t get damaged. A U-Haul truck costs $.99 per mile, so you are looking at about $900 just to get this to your house. Look at keeping part of it or just salvaging everything. The value is rolling stock, electronics, buildings and track. You could even just keep the bench tops with the track work so you can reuse all the track.
Funny you should asked. I just moved a 9x24 layout about 500 miles to a new home. It was donated to the local Youth In Model Railroading group but they had no place for the actual layout. My new model railroad property was the only place big enough to hold it, so my children adopted it. It broke down into 4 major pieces. The largest was 7x10. There were several smaller pieces (about 7). Even though the layout had been supposedly made to be sectional we still had to break a major crossbeam to get it apart. The hardest part was getting it out of the origination point layout. One of the mountains had to be chopped off.
I moved it in a 7x14 foot trailer. I placed the large pieces on their edge on the floor and nailed chocks into the floor to keep it from shifting. The top edge was tied to the sides of the trailer with bungee cords. The modules not against the wall were held apart from the ones which were against the top with chocks nailed to the floor and on the top by putting a 1x4 across them with a dry wall screws. Finally they were bungee corded to the floor. Don’t forget loads shift up and down as well as sideways.
I was amazed at the lack of damage. I think all that did occur happened while loading and unloading not in the actual transport. I expected a whole lot worse.
Since I own the trailer it cost about $200 in fuel. But I was making the trip anyway to mow the grass so basically it cost me nothing.
Others have suggested that you strip of the valuable pieces and trash the rest, well it’s obvious to me that your looking to keep the layout intact for what ever reasons and thats no different then the reason to build one in the first place. That being said here are a few things to think about.
. #1. take at least one friend along with you. Your going to need help carrying the pieces from where ever they live now to your rental truck, Also find a place online near by where you can buy a lot of boxes and moving supplies etc. fro all the structures etc. that may come along with the layout if any. and a half dozen or so newspapers to wrap everything in.
#2. bring along a digital camera and a notebook, before your start dismantling the layout if it’s not already been done prior to your arrival take as many pictures as your memory card will hold. Of how everything goes together form track work to bench work and especially wiring. It never fails if your lucking enough to get it home in one piece when you start to put it back together your never going to remember where everything goes.
#3. Bring along a dremel tool with a handful of cut off wheels, A dremel tool will cut the rails as clean. You may be lucky enough to be able to piece them back together without much work but even if not you’ll be able to replace the cut sections more easily.
#4. If not the most important step clean out your basement or train room completely before you leave. Nothing worse them traveling 700 miles to get home and have no place to put it.
#5 going with #4 I would have the present owner give you dimensions of each section and how they go together, perhaps a sketch on a piece of graft paper. Depending on how good you are. with a tape measure or not see if it will fit your layout space and if your going to need to make modifications. If you need a visual reference pick up a roll of craft paper and cut out pieces and tape them together to make up the sections of the layout, number them accordin
If the layout can be moved and I wanted keep it I would move it after all they move modular layouts from show to show.Even the great N Scale Clinchfield layout was displayed by MR at various conventions and shows,was given away in a contest and shipped to the winner and has been sold and moved at least twice.
The idea of trashing a layout that can be moved is just sly of being ridiculous and outdated thinking.
Then there’s the hefty cost to replace the layout that hasn’t been mention.
Again If the layout fits you new home and you want to keep it then by all means move it.