I am gonna be closing on my first house soon and it has a large basement. I want to hit the ground running when i move in in a few months (after some updating and basement wall removal) on my next train layout. Freelancing is the way i want to go but i have a hard time selecting an idea that works and that i really like. What i do know is that i have an estimated 800-900 sq ft. layout space, want a long single track mainline, large yard and an ajoining staging yard. I want to run six axle diesels and long trains (20-30+ cars) of boxcars, oh and i have an undecorated Atlas Master series SD26 with sound. That is about all that i can deside on that want, beyond that i need some help focusing on an idea for a freelanced railroad. Thanks for any advice, information, and help.
OK, SD26 sets your era as 1973 or later. Strange choice though - as I understand it, only ATSF had SD26’s.
One idea I always liked for freelancing is to choose a section of interstate highway that you are familiar with and steal their rightaway. Name your railroad after the towns at each end. It would also be nice if a two different real railroads went through those towns so you could interchange with them. Maybe you are a bridge route.
Model the industries that are in the real towns along the route. They may not be served by rail, but they certainly should be. This way you can do what you want as far as choosing power and rolling stock, but you have the real geography to keep you grounded and give you a starting point so you don’t have to invent everything on your own.
And proving once again there is a prototype for everything, B&O had plans in the 1920’s to build a new mainline along what later became the I-80 to give themselves a shorter mainline between Jersey City and Chicago. I’ve always thought that would make a nice “what if” layout, giving you the basics of B&O to freelance around.
Greg
Just off the top of my head, as much to get a discussion started as anything else, I’d consider a T-shaped layout. On one end of the top of the T is a West Coast seaport. On the other end of the top of the T is Points East, which is a staging yard. The center vertical part of the T is the large yard. Where they all come together is Mountain Division, giving you a chance for something more interesting than flat brown sand, and helpers if you’d like.
This is going to be a point-to-point. That’s one preference you didn’t mention.
It’s time to step back and take a deep breath. I have about 1100 sq ft of basement, and only 500 sq ft are dedicated to trains. The rest is occupied by laundry/utility room, a 3/4 bath, and the ‘Crew Lounge’(family room). My point is that you do not want to fill that 800-900 sq ft with just the train layout - There are other things that need to be taken in account. I have 12 staging tracks(15-17’ long), a yard, two towns and a branch line in my space. All that with 30" minimum radius.
You have lot’s of ‘House Stuff’ on your plate - Designing a train layout is ‘free’. Don’t get tied up with the ‘I will have a layout’ in the next year.
Jim
Looks like i left a few things out. First off is the layout will be have a continous loop, the staging yard can service both ends of the scenic part for point to point operations. Second your right about not using all the basement, my basement is a little over 1100 sq ft, one room has the furnace and water heater in a closet and has lots of shelfs, thus its the workshop. I also have to keep a third or fourth of the outside walls clear for a door and the suck pump. Oh and the washer and dryer are upstairs in my house. Third, my operating crew size will be small, up to 3 or 4 at best for most times. Once in a while i could have a larger crew but most could only just run trains and obey signals. I kinda am more so wanting to model long stretchs of mainline without alot of towns. I guise what i need help most on is where would the type of railroad i need run, what would its size need to be in real life, what era’s would work best. Thanks for your help and keep it coming. [:)]
Oh forgot to add that i just need a loop of mainline up and running by the end of this year, i will take my time on everything else but want to have that train running in circles to help keep my intreset up and making progress.
Is there anything your significant other might like done, either upstairs or downstairs? Washer and drier fits in up stairs or downstairs? You have somewhere to store the garden tools, the lawnmower, the snowblower, that kinda stuff?
How is the layout space fixed for ventilation, heat, light, access, air conditioning, moisture, electrical outlets? It’s fairly easy to do this stuff before the bench work starts, and nearly impossible after the room fills up with layout. BTW, it’s MUCH easier to paint backdrops BEFORE the benchwork goes up. Don’t ask me how I know this. In my cinder block basement, we put up two inch foamboard insulation on all the walls and then sheetrocked over it. It made the place much warmer, drier, and cosier and didn’t consume any electric power.
Have you read “Track Planning for Realistic Operation” by John Armstrong?
Length of train you can run is limited by the length of your passing sidings. Plan accordingly. My 6 axle Proto2K E units have no difficulty on 22 inch curves. More is better when it comes to minimum curve radius.
Free lancing means you can have what you like when it comes to terrain, towns, town names, line side industries, foliage, climate, road names and the like. If you have a favorite prototype road, you might plan interchange with it. That gives a reason for RTR equipment painted for other roads to operate. Think about supplier/customer industries. Operations can benefit from having a supplier like a coal mine, and a consumer like an electric power station, on the line. Think about terrain to justify a high bridge, trains alway look good up on bridges.
If you are into research, just about every town in the United States had plans to run a railroad from downtown to the Pacific ocean at one time or another. Any thing you can find about these planned railroads can give you
Like all things in this hobby, freelancing depends on how deeply you want to dive into it. I am in my third try of building a layout based on a freelanced railroad. The third try is because my wife finally was cured of the urge to move every three years. The real estate crash did have an upside around here!
Over the course of the last 13 or so years, my available space has changed…grown immensely then shrunk some. My ideal end state has changed some. My track plans have changed (in part due to the available space/size changing). But some things have not changed, and I think they are important to a freelance railroad. These are not in order of importance or in the order the decision was or should be made. I think there is a lot of flexibility there. I think developing answers to these things is very important with larger layouts, but the word I will not use is “necessary.” Some of these things will occur to you if you ask yourself “why” each time you design some aspect of your railroad or consider buying something.
You may want to develop a story line for:
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Geographic location. Not only for the layout but for where else your railroad might go that is beyond the layout.
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Time period. Someone else cited 1973, since that is when SD24s were rebuilt into SD26s. You probably want to be more recent than that, since Santa Fe was the creator of the SD26. To that end, here is a slice of alleged history from Wikipedia (I have not fact checked it),
“Changing philosophies regarding motive power expenditures led the Santa Fe to begin trimming its SD26 roster in the Spring of 1985, when 44 of the locomotives were retired and traded to EMD in exchange for 15 new GP
Yes, I was going to mention this. It’s a good idea to keep those dust producing saws and other tools away from the layout if at all possible.
I was also going to mention the John Armstrong track planning book (mentioed above); if you do not have it, it is a great investment. Lots of good information on designing a layout that will run smoothly. Another good book is one of the recent Kalmbach books on building benchwork.
About the continuous running - how do you plan to enter and exit the layout? Will you do a duckunder or will there be a turnback loop on your main line? Duckunders are a real pain in the head and back when you do not duck far enough. Maybe some kind of gate? Give this some serious thought. With a gate, how do you prevent a train from taking a header to the floor when the gate is open. How to you keep the tracks aligned when the gate closes? There have been a number articles in MR addressing these issues.
Adelie, all thoughs questions is what im looking for [:D] thanks. I have so many different ideas that points like that can help me to deside whats more important and whats not. A smaller bridge route is what i have thought of for a while, maybe around the size and scope of the Western Pacific. The post 1985 is fine with me and offers lots of secound gen diesel for my railroad. As far as the basement goes its fully finished already, washer and dryer is upstairs, garden tools out in the shed in the back yard. there is a concreate basketball court outside the back door to my basement so i can do work that creates fuems out there. My plan is for the loop to be complete by a single track duckunder/lift gate into the staging yard, then your inside the whole loop. I plan to also forgo a backdrope in some areas so people can come down the stairs and immediatly see trains. And i think those books would be a great investment for me. Thanks yall. [:)]
Zrail,
I’ll keep this short. Consider a double track mainline, instead of single. Always more to run and more things to do to keep you or friends busy. Instead of a large yard and staging, combine the two and make it double ended, you’ll never regret that part. I have a rather large layout, that I have already started to downsize, which was easy to do, for I made it in sections, that were bolted together. It is still large, 8’x 32 x 10’. I mainly am the only operator now, but run two mainline trains each direction and I fiddle with switching the industrys when I am not working on the layout. It’s DC 3 Cab control, but I have BLI sound equipped locos that I run on the mains, especially when the Grandkids are over. Mine is freelanced, but I like Santa Fe Zebra stripes, so that is mostly what you see. My favorite, five BB SD 40-2’s, pulling a 50ft long stack train and freight ABBA F3’s pulling a reefer block or tank train. I like bridges and building them, so I have a lot. I have no grades, no reverse loops, all level track, the terrain changes not the track, it just looks like the track changes, mostly open grid bench work. Oh, no foam either. Up and running going on 30 yrs now, track is totally finished, not scenery. Working on that now, 12ft of brick street in the city Industrial area, that I have been working on for six months now, getting close.
Think it over, try not to cram to much in at once.
Take Care!
Frank
Well, there are a lot of thoughts to give…but I’ll stick with a few. You might not fully appreciate this…but try to be consistent with your purchases, your planning, and your theme.
For example, why do you need a staging tracks if you only have one locomotive? Are you planning to set strings of cars on the staging tracks and then have the locomotive pick them up to represent different trains running at different times? Normally, having a large yard at one end and staging tracks at the other works well for when you want to model a railroad that has many trains running through the given scene. For that, you’d want different locomotives heading each staged train.
OTOH, one locomotive would be useful in modeling a short line, or a branch line of a major railroad, where the locomotive picks up cars at the interchange (or a couple of staging tracks) and takes them to the yard and distributes them to industries. For this type of theme, a single SD26 wouldn’t really be the locomotive of choice for a railroad.
So think about your priorities, do you want to run trains in a visual way that appeals to you, or do you want to build a layout that represents realistic operations in a specific setting? Neither is better than the other, but the latter does require a sort of consistency between theme, era, equipment, etc… which will help you keep your wasted purchases to a minimum.
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I’ll third the double track mainline, especially if you are going to be operating on your own very often. My plan is to be able to launch a train or two while I control one that is going to have to do various tasks like switching cars. Eventually I’ll set it up so the computer is smart enough to “intelligently” handle the background noise trains, but until then it will be up to me to avoid fiascoes. I’m using DCC, block occupancy detectors and have some signals and the associated logic in JMRI set up. The double track main allows me to minimize the fiascoes and also just let a couple run while I am doing other things.
Incidentally, my train room is in the basement next to my office, so I could have the luxury of using it as a diversion during conference calls with poeple who I think are insane.
Also, one railroad I might suggeest you do a little research on if you develop the railroad operating philosophy, preferences, etc is the Kyle Railroad. They operate in western Kansas and eastern Colorado, not necessarily the most gripping are of the country scenically. They are now part of the Genesee and Wyoming family. Anyway, their historic locomotive roster is a pretty good indicator of how a small railroad would keep itself running. One thing I see having Googled them and looking at locomotive photos is while they have their own paint scheme, they also run several locomotives in the livery of their former owner, with “Kyle” painted on the cab above the number. Among them are a slew of old SP SD-45Ts.
I’ve got an RS-11 in Alco Demonstrator livery that I might consider doing something similar with.
Excellent idea. Get something to run as soon as you can. It keeps things moving along. Gives you a tanglible short range goal, close enough in time that you can see it and feel it. Gives you a chance to detect mistakes and correct them before you replicate them everywhere.
I would suggest you model a major railroad accurately and a short line or regional for equipment not prototypical for the major railroad. My PRR stuff is as accurate as I can make it but my Allegheny Railroad has a big boy, GS4s and other engines bought when steam was being phased out. The yard can be an interchange point between the two. You can allow either to have trackage rights on the existing track.
I really like the double track mainline idea, it makes alot of sence for what i want. I plan to have many more locomotives and the SD26 is just the start. (I do have other less expensive locos but id rather not try to have to use them) I had wanted to stear clear of creating a large freelance railroad but that might actually work for me. And here is an idea on the SD26, my railroad also wanted to rebuild aging SD24’s and was really impressed with Santa Fe’s work. So they got the Santa Fe to help rebuild theres and just add some of my own railroads distinct features to the locos.
After ATSF were done with their SD26’s, the Guilford Rail System bought a lot of them. Perhaps your railroad wouldv’e bought some from them. That would change your era into a more modern time frame as well as shifting the location to New England. Atlas makes the SD26 in the Guilford paint scheme too, if you wanted to run a few of those.
Zrail,
What I did when I put in my double track mainline was not to do it all at the same time. The area for the track was laid out for the double, but I completed the outer line first, including where a crossover would be. I just put the turnout in along with the track when I laid it. I used all #6 turnouts for the crossovers, just put a track spike in the throwbar so the turnout would be set for straight. That way I could have a train that would run all around the layout. I slowly then added the inner mainline, trying to get from crossover to crossover, that way I could run two trains in opposite directions when I wanted to. It made for interesting operations for awhile. I have ten crossovers, five in each direction. I did the same with spurs and sidings. I put the turnout in the main, but didn’t continue the track till the one main was done. Takes a little planning, but it worked for me.
Have Fun! Rome they say was not built in a day.
Frank