I have a room above our garage that measures 14’ wide by 39’ long at the longest that I am looking for suggestions on a layout design. I want to model the TP&W as if it had a route from Peoria through Lafeyette Indiana to Cincinnati. I would like to have a decent yard for Peoria, an industrial park in the Lafeyette area and a small IM yard at the Cincinnatti end. I would like to have a continous layout with doubletrack so I can just run trains in between switching. The one problem I have is the ceiling slopes starting around 50" high so I need to drop the layout down to around 44-46". I would like to do a around the room with a peninsula down the middle maybe. It is basically a rectangle shaped room. If I can draw something up and post it I will
what scale?
Welcome rswain,
You seem to have a decent grasp on what you want so I’ll skip some of the really basic stuff and get to the point, with one exception. If you haven’t yet read “Track Planning For Realistic Operation”, get it. You will learn tons of stuff that you didn’t know that you didn’t know, ya know? (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
Ok, on to the good stuff!
A run down the center of the room is a good idea. It would add “miles” to the mainline.
When talking about layout design, I am assuming that you mean layout style? If so, I have some thoughts.
Are you able to do a nolix. That’s a layout that is usually on a shelf that goes around the perimiter of the room climbing the whole way, kind of like a corkscrew. The reason I suggest this is that you could put the low end of the corkscrew where you have limited ceiling clearence. The grade (slope) would not have to be much throughout the layout and if done right it would look pretty flat. Sidings and yards would be flat of course, to keep control of runaway boxcars and so forth. With this option you spread out the height difference over the whole layout so it isn’t immediately noticable.
A second option would be to pull the layout off the wall with the limited clearence. Pull it out two or three feet and now the whole layout can be level. Behind the backdrop on the offending wall you could have lots of hidden staging. This could be quite an impressive setup, but you do lose some real estate up front. I don’t know if that would be possible for you, but if the slope is on the 39 foot wall that would be an awesome staging yard! I have to say that I wouldn’t mind that kind of a setup at my house!
The last option would be to use a helix. Think of it as a spiral that the train goes through to gain or lose height. The main problems with them are access for cleaning and rerails, trains being out of sight for long periods, and hiding / making it look realistic. None of th
in reply to the first reply, it is HO scale. In regards to the second reply I hadn’t thought about pulling the layout on the long wall and using the space behind for staging. I will have to give that some thought. The only bad thing with the room being 14’ wide I may not have enough room to do that. I was thinking of running the layout around the room with a peninsula in the middle that would be higher then start dropping at either end of the penisula as I come around the room in opposite directions to meet up at the correct height. Trying to decide if I want any track running through the same scene or just have it go around the room, up one side of the peninsula and down the other.
Thanks for the advice. I do have that book, I need to go back to it now.
If the room is 14 foot wide you should be able to do two three foot walkways on either side of the room centerline and two foot wide shelves with the center run and sides. If you pull the layout from the walls then you could have one side in a foot wide shelf and maybe do the same to one side of the center run. You would then have one side of the center run 1 foot wide and the other 2 foot. The 2 foot side could have a one horse town to switch and the 1 foot side could just be a long uninterrupted line through the woodsy mountains or whatever with the focus there on spactacular scenery (Bridges, gorges, whatever) just made for railfanning.
But, it would be even better if it was on the short wall! - Still long enough, and the space ‘lost’ is in the long dimension! - Wow!
[But, the fact you even mentioned the slope really provides the answer I guess 
- But, if I was building a room…