My son and I have come to the conclusion that we either need to move to a bigger\diggerent house or we need to rent a bobcat when mom’s gone and knock out walls. We just seem to have a “great” room for the new N-scale layout.
Two options for rooms:
“uproom2” has that weird part of the room that goes around the corner. It’s alot of space to ignore, but it may be inaccessible unless we run a very small aisle against the wall with the window. with this room we can still have some decent size walkways if we do some sort of dogbone\waterwing layout, but the area and the corner bugs me
“room” is our basement. I’ve been noodling alot with that room, but the 105" width seems to get pretty restricted once I add 36" for the ends of the waterwings\dogbones. the room feels like it’s really going to be packed.
I’ve posted previoulsy on the basement room- thanks for ideas there- it’s just a tiny room and tough to make a layout wth continuous running on “big” trains.
Looking for creativity and suggestions. I’ve pretty much bought everything kalmbach has and looked around the internet- guess I’m looking for ideas, and especially some dialogue.
I’d suggest that you modify your trackplan to an around-the-room style. You should be able to get wide curves and lots of running room, coupled with easy access to all of it.
btw- I think we’re going to go with Sievers benchwork, 'cuz dad is pretty incompetent when it comes to building something like good benchwork. Besides, there’s too little time to mess with benchwork vs. building (and running) the layout.
The reason why dad brings this up is the idea of a lift out or bridge. The idea of a duck under doesn’t sound appealing to mom, and will make it hard for grandparents to come in ad enjoy the trains, and the idea of dad buidling a liftout that doesn’t make trains go flying isn’t in the cards either. We’ve thought about an “around the room”, but logistics and skill don’t quite line up
Perhaps a hammer will suffice. Since you are modelling in N-Scale consider the possiblity of punching a couple of holes in the wall between rooms and using the wall itself as the world’s largest scenic divider. City scene on one side, mountains on the other, etc. Or use the other room for a hidden staging yard, with no scenery at all. Walls are only obstacles if they are concerete, with dirt on the other side.
I think your first space is definitely usable for N-scale.
Using the alcove, and presuming you put aside 36" for an aisle, you would end up with 11-12" space around the edge… plenty of room for N-scale action. You could have a brach line run along this space then open it up into some industry or terminating town, perhaps with staging, along the right had side of the room.
Because it would be an inside curve, it would be a really great spot for a nice run through some dramatic scenic elements. Trains always look nicer on the inside of a curve then the outside. You could even squeeze the isle down to 30" if you set it up so that no more then one operator would need to be in there at a time…
