A few months ago, the CFO of my N scale railroad dropped the news that we need to move in with her aging parents to help them out more directly. We’ll basically be turning the basement into an “in-laws” apartment but without a kitchen. BUT, I’ve been promised full use of the 2-car detached garage. I can’t use up all 20 ft by 20 ft for a layout (I have a motorcycle, yard equipment, workbench, etc., that needs a home too, after all), but I can use one half of the garage, roughly 20 ft by 10 ft, for a Version 4 of my layout. As this is better than twice my current layout room space, I’m pretty stoked about the possibilities this opportunity represents.
Fortunately, I already have a plan which will salvage about 50% of my current layout; mostly what I gain with the larger space is the ability to increase the separation between my 3 or 4 key scenes, and I can increase my mainline minimum radius, decrease my ruling grade, increase my aisle widths, and eliminate a duck-under. It’s basically the same plan as at present, but stretched. All good things. Areas that I cannot save in their current form will effectively be rebuilt for the new space. I even have space to add a second peninsula. All in all, the layout will operate nearly identically as it currently does, as fundamentally all that will change is going from roughly 1.4 scale miles to about 4 scale miles in mainline run. These plans are well underway (well, as underway as they can be; still struggling to get the brother-in-law to get his crap cleared out of the garage before we officially move at the end of the year), and I’m totally pleased with the basic plan.
What I’m less well sure of is my space itself. I’ve never built in a detach garage in Louisville; hot humid summers, cool damp winters, representing yearly temp swings from the teens to upper 90s. Some things I know I’ll need to do before starting the layout properly include putting up insulation board at least along the ceilin
Jason, not sure how much help this will be, but I built a layout in a garage in Michigan (similar temp swings, zero insulation or conditioning of the space) using dimensional lumber with osb on top. With minimal gapping of track, I had no issues other than it always seemed to be too hot or too cold in the garage to stand being out there long. You definitely have the right idea in insulating and conditioning the space.
I’ve heard of people ripping down plywood as it ended up being cheaper than buying an equivalent number of pieces of dimensional lumber, but I’ve not heard about differences in stability. Not saying there isn’t a difference, but it would seem to me that if there is a noticeable difference, soon enough someone will chime in about their mainline having a washboard effect from the differences. I’ve never heard of it, but maybe someone has.
Wood swells and shrinks and warps with humidity changes, there is very little change to wood from temperature. The shrinkage and expansion is mostly across the grain as the fibers add/give up moisture (about 5:1 ratio of across the grain to with the grain). Pine and other soft woods shrink/swell more than denser woods. Wood without reasonably straight grain may curve and warp more than straight grained wood due to uneven swelling/contraction of individual fibers. Inner fibers take longer to adjust changes in humidity.
Painting the wood reduces the speed of the mositure migration. This is often enough to get the wood past the low or high humidity points without the wood reaching peak expansion/contraction.
Using stain or similar coatings, because they are drawn further into the wood, reduce the speed of moisture migration even more.
A non-permeable coating must be applied to all surfaces of the wood. If only applied on one side, the other side is open to moisture migration, and uneven moisture migration will happen, causing warping and coating failure.
Reasonable humidity control is sufficient in most cases to prevent damage, even with unpainted wood.
Plywood has much reduced change from moisture migration due to the thiness of the veneers, the different grain directions of each layer, and the constraints of the glue. But we have all seen cases where the outler layer of plywood swells enough to break the glue bond in places, resulting in washboarding of the outer layer.
Learned these lessons being around wood and plywood boats.
Based on experiences with my dock and both indoor and outdoor wood structures, some humidity control of the space is probably essential (and sufficient) to keeping a wood structure intact, especially with wood that has long been acclimated to the existing climate. If you are still nervous, latex paint will provide that much more
Sounds like my gut instincts were pretty well on target, especially on the dehumidifier side of things. The AC and Heater were primarily for my own comfort; who wants to stand around in either 40 degree or 90 degree temps trying to solder or work on scenery? The trains likely wouldn’t care either way, but I sure would.
Ironically, the one experience I’ve had with badly popped track came about on a pretty basic test oval with a few sidings I set up on about a 3x7 sheet of 3/4" particle board in the living room, back before I even had a sofa to sit on. I had set up it up to experiment with the new-fangled (to me) DCC, then got called away for 2 weeks of work out of state. The temps never got above 70, but it was late spring with high humidity every day, and the kicker was that one end of the oval got about 5 hours of direct sunlight each day. I think the sunlit end got baked and contracted, while the shadowed remainder slowly absorbed moisture and expanded. I had track joints popped an inch or more above the roadbed in a few places when I got home, and outright failure of the glue I used to hold the track down in other places.
But lessons were learned, which was the whole point of that “layout”. The trainroom faces a different direction and only gets very late day sun, and I switched my subroadbed to quality ply and caulk for the track, and I’ve not had any issues since, regardless of how stinking muggy my place gets when I’m away for weeks at a time. Version 1 I left a lot of track gaps, but with the revisions to 1B I didn’t even think of it and had no problems. Version 2 and the current V3, I have some gaps, but nowhere near as many as some folks recommended.
I’ll probably err on the side of caution with the garage build, and paint/seal my benchwork and leave more track gaps than I current have. A good dehumidifier, some thermal controls for me, and some insulation to help those thermal controls out, and I think I’
I have advised separating or divorcing couples where one won’t move their stuff out (I did this when my wife left me):
Pay one month’s rent on a storage unit. Move all the stuff you don’t want into the storage unit. Inform the person what has happened, and provide them with the key to the storage unit. Inform said person that if they return to the house, police will be called.
Yes, this solution is a lot of work but so is cajoling/arguing/threatening the other person to get their stuff out. The up side is that you are in total control of the process and the timeline and what you keep as yours, and the other person isn’t. All they can do is bitterly complain about you after the fact.
Fred W
…modeling foggy coastal Oregon in HO and HOn3, where it’s alwasy 1900…
Before starting any garage constructon, perhaps find a LHS or local MR club to ask folks who they set up such layouts. Plenty build layouts in garages. They know how garages handle the elements and avoid the operator(s) freezing or melting.
I enjoy hearing about people’s earlier layouts and what was learned from each.
If you are interested, here are the previous STRATTON AND GILLETTE LAYOUTS:
High School Layout, N Scale, 21 square feet, 14 years old: This layout was started with big ambitions for it to be part of my future permanent lifetime layout. An N scale layout that grows. It had an engine terminal and two loops of track. Expansion tracks on both ends of the layout were intended to make it part of a peninsula on a much bigger layout in the future.
Oh, the many track plans I drew that included plans for the expansion. Looking back on them now, they were all terrible ideas.
It went to the landfill when I was 19 and moved in with my cute-punk-rocker-girlfriend Jeanna. She was much more interesting at the time. The layout would have lasted longer than our relationship.
Dream House Layout, N scale, 800 square feet, 21 years old: Within a period of less than 12 months, I broke up with Jeanna, met my wife, got married, was blessed with a step-daughter and had another baby girl on the way. That was fast.
My wife and I both had money going into the relationship to build a life with. We bought 1 1/2 acres of land and had my dream house built to be our forever home. I designed this house in High School. We were so happy and everything was looking great for us.
I don’t like to get into the ugly details of what happened to us next. We encountered severe financial hardship and went into complete despair from a position of being flush with cash. We were very lucky and got out of the house and out of debt, but our credit was shattered.
The dream house layout reached the point where I could r
Man, thanks for that Kevin! This reminded me so much of my first real layout in my early teens, in my case HO scale, but a monolithic monstrosity 10’ by 10’ sqaure. I didn’t help that I learned about trains and model railroading primarily from my grandfather, who had mostly collector-worthy 3-rail Lionel and later standard guage as his vision failed, and his layout was basically 10’ x 80’ with concentric ovals. Obviously, he wanted a place to railfan his collectibles, with barely any thoughts towards a modeled railroad. But being young and dumb, I thought my basement empire would be best served with a huge table entirely fitting the space my dad permitted me in the basement. He’s still finding places to use all the lumber from that thing, 30 years later!
The giant table was totally unfeasible, of course. All I ever managed to do with it was put in a few ovals within reach from the edge, with a small yard crossing the middle that could only be switched by climbing on the table, and the worst chicken-mesh and concrete (yes, concrete) mountain in one corner.
But man, did I plan! I had ideas to model the Bethlehem Steel works (lots of family history there), and such a large table might have worked OK for that, if I covered 70% of it with massive blast furnaces and didn’t run tracks any further inward than I could reach. But as young and broke as I was, my plans never went further than lots, and LOTS, of paper sketches. I found a stack of them a few years ago, and they’re all terrible, terrible plans.
But it definitely outlined the problem I’ve always tended towards in the hobby: biting off more than I can chew. I’ve gotten a lot better at that, fortunately. It only took a couple of rebuilds to hammer than point home, both in my thought processes and in t