I’m looking at a section of my layout that I’m not quite happy with. I think the transition from city->country is too quick and awkard.
Well I thought I could stick a helix at the end and double deck it, letting the second level be the country setting.
I was hoping to have my city setting at 48" high. (4 Feet) The main city setting is QUITE large and goes around the room. So I’m hoping to keep it at about this level. If I go up another 2 feet (the miminum betwen levels I feel) then the contry setting will be at 6 feet. (This is obviously too high for maintenance and visual operation) If I go down 2 feet, then it’s only 2 feet off the ground.
So how do you guys handle benchwork height on overlapping double deckers?
what if you put it only 18" above that would give alittle lower for access you can always put a back drop on the bottom of the top layer and curve it down so that way it would look like sky… and heck you could put fiber optics in it and give it stars if you want to run at night…
and a cheap back drop is Vynil flooring can save money that way…not sure if I read that here or in one of my MRR mags
im not sure of what your layout looks like and I may be just talking out my Butt
also what is the with of your layout? 24"30"?? more less? because if you where to make the top level a little narrower it would also help with making the height differance
I’d also think about putting the city, with it’s taller buildings, on the top level, and the country, with it’s lower skyline, on the lower level. That might help with the level hight problem.
BTW, I used 18 inches of seperation on my last one with the city on top and it worked out good. The city building seemed to soar into the sky.
You might consider making your country scene shallow (12 inches or so) and reducing the separation to 14" (3 1/2 turns of a helix with 4 inch per turn grade) That way your country scene would be at either 34" (your younger visitors would love it) or 62" (not so wonderful, since it would ‘squash’ your city buildings.) I’m assuming that the aisle edge of both scenes would be in the same vertical plane.
I’m running into a similar situation, except that my scenes are on the opposite sides of a peninsula; 12 inches of ‘country’ on one side (with storage shelves above and below) and 4 feet of ‘city’ on the other.