The move to Colorado Springs area has finally happened. All but the new job are in place for work to begin on the HO 1900-era Picture Gorge and Western Railway and HOn3 Tillamook Head and Bethel Railway.
Unfortunately, the house of choice did not have the hoped-for space for model railroading. The room, in a finished basement, has 3 exterior walls and 2 windows. The room, just under 11ft x 13ft, will have to serve as a dual use space. It will be train room, home office, and kids’ computer stations (3 computer stations).
I read with great interest the thread on whether or not 60" was too high for a shelf layout. For my dream to work out, the computer stations/desks and model workbench are going to have to be located under portions of the layout, although the seating area would be in the aisle or open space. For those of you who have actually built something like this in the past, is a bottom of benchwork “roof” at 50" over a work station of normal proportions (29" keyboard, 31" desk height, 19" monitors) practical and comfortable to work at? Does adding extra lighting “under the roof” make or break the idea? My starting assumptions were a 24" deep shelf, allowing 4" for support thickness, giving actual track heights of 54.5" to 58.5". In light of the other thread (I am 5’9" and rest of family is shorter), is going 4" lower to a 46" roof over a computer work station practical?
The second question applies to cassettes or removable sections. In my inital plans, a 59" window would be spanned with a removable section. Blocking the window permanently is unacceptable. The removable section would not always be used to operate the layout - it would link the HOn3 section with the standard gauge interchange. The rest of the HOn3 and the HO sections could be operated independently without the removable section
First) Let me welcome you to Colo Springs ,your the second person from the the forum that I know of as being in the area.
Second) A big part of the answer to your question is going to depend on several factors, like how wide, how thick, and how far you will have to reach, how easy it is to hold onto it and that question of all questions - how heavy that section of track is.
Third) Sunbird Train mart ( aka Discount Trains ) isn’t the best local source.
To properly address your concerns, here is some information based on my personal experience. I’m sure that others will have similar insights.
My own desk/model work surface/computer station has the TOP of the keyboard at 29" and the actual continuous countertop at 27.5" (not consciously planned; that’s where the 3/4" plywood top ended up when I put it on top of the 2-drawer filing cabinets.) I am just about your height, and find this a very comfortable work table level.
You might be able to get away with 46" for a “ceiling” height over the children’s work stations (until they outgrow it - and they will!) but I measured upward from my desktop and found that the alternative to a minimum 53" “ceiling” will be a well-padded lower fascia edge. (The other alternative, scalp and forehead laceration, was considered unacceptable.) I actually have a bookshelf over the back of my coun
The chairs for your desks will take up about 1/4 of the room in front of your layout. You could build platforms in the rest of the space just high enough to go under the bottom drawers on the desks. 60" would be quite reasonable then.
As for the staging area, well, you saw my plan for a traverser. You could have several tracks behind the layout and bring them out or park them as needed. Mine is a stub end, but there is no reason why it couldn’t be in the middle. In the final version, my traverser will be 6 feet long and ride on drawer hardware.
Thanks very much for the thoughtful responses so far.
The wife has been rethinking our use of other rooms in the house in an attempt to dedicate the 11x14 room for trains. It’s great having her support.
In any case, thanks again for the various suggestions. The weight of the 60" “cassette” was never viewed as an issue. Being a wright and not a smith, I had thought of a foam/thin plywood composite I, C, or box beam to support the track. However, the metal should work equally well. And I had planned on a tapered vertical design for the casette end plates and receivers to help guide the cassette as it was lowered into place. Scenery was not intended, as the cassette would normally fit on a high shelf when not in use (nromal condition). The question, which will likely require experimentation on my part, is whether a 60" long cassette is too long and unwieldly to consistently set in place without damaging anything else.
If the cassette proves to be the success I’m hoping it will be, I may make several, including a couple of standard gauge to serve as my staging as well as my layout link across the window.
I shall try cardboard mockups of computer stations with a layout “ceiling” to get a feel as to how well it might work/not work. I need to know in case moving the computer stations into the small guest room or other space doesn’t pan out for any reason - including guests more frequently than expected!
Aisleways where desk chairs would be used would be 40" at worst case. Other aisles are no narrower than 29". Best use of the resultant area (no duckunders allowed in a multi-purpose room) appears to be a proverbial 4ft x 6ft-8ft peninsula with a C shaped shelf going around 3 walls. Diagram to follow soon. The practicality of the heights and the 60" cassette are going to determine whether this plan will work.
• a sliding keyboard tray below the desktop @ 24.5" aff
• height of computer display @ 18-19" above desk (as you said)
• desk chair seat @ 17-18" aff
I am 5’-9.5", and the above dimensions result in my top of head @ approximately 50.5" if I sit up straight (which I rarely do!). It is all quite comfortable. I also fit 2-drawer rolling file cabinets under the counter.
My 13 yo son has a bunkbed with the frame bottom at 50.5 inches above the floor. His desk is underneath, and it fits him ok, but it’s a tight fit for me. I have to lower the chair and still worry about tearing the top of my scalp out.
Fred, I look over at my close-by layout which requires me to stoop under 43.5" to get to the operating pit. Not ideal, but I am living with it…I am still short after all these years. [:)], and still reasonably limber, so that is what I built. In any event, I have imagined what it would be like to have been required to build a work station under my yard, but if I had also built the yard a full 8.5" higher than it is. The answer is that yes, it would have been quite a reasonable thing to have done. Even with the lighting above the work station(s), which I firmly believe will be mandatory for long-term acceptability and comfort. I am sure someone with your abilities and experience will have no trouble doing what he knows he can to keep the family functioning at peak level. The only little grinders that I could see might be in the clutter that tends to lie around work spaces that are frequently attended to during the day or evening, and that includes non-train people who have things to do there for extended periods for extended days in a row, while another grinder could be overall ease of moving around in tight spaces.
So, long way of saying that you would be well advised to contrive a mock-up and have everyone give an honest appraisal of it all. Maybe just a scale cardboard model would suffice, but actually marking it off with a rudimentary frame of 1X2 might make the assessment by all stakeholders that much more accurate. Bottom line, better for you.
Thanks again to all for your thoughtful comments. Crandell is right, I definitely need to mock this up full size to get buy-in from the entire family.
So far I have been able to hold on to the larger basement bedroom as the combined office, computer, and train room. The smaller basement bedroom (about 9 x 11ft usable, but only one window) has become the guest bedroom. The justification for the larger room, even with my mother-in-law’s arrival last night, is that the office/computer/train room will get used on a daily basis. The guest bedroom will only get used occasionally. Like I said, so far this has held despite the larger room adjoining the basement bathroom, and having 2 windows.
To keep the larger room, I am going to have to ensure it is truly a multi-purpose room where the family doesn’t feel overwhelmed by trains. So my Plan B, if the mockup proves too overwhelming and constricting, would be to revert to the smaller bedroom and just have an L-shaped shelf layout.
Either case is better than I have ever had in the past where the threat of moving within 36 months was always present. That threat has paralyzed me more than I want to admit. Given the reality of the present housing market, it’ll be years before we can even consider moving again, no matter how much we may want to (and I sure don’t right now).
Next task is to find employment in Colorado Springs. This commuting to California is getting old (I’m writing this from the Las Vegas airport).
If N scale suited me better, I wouldn’t hesitate to make the change. But I’m a kit builder, and hopefully some day, scratch builder. I like to tinker with my locomotives - regearing and remotoring and tuning to get very smooth slow scale operation. And my eyes aren’t what they used to be - I need readers for close-up work now.
At times, I wonder if even HO and HOn3 are too small for me for modeling short lines and narrow gauge of the last part of the 19th Century. I probably would have gone On30/O or S/Sn3 if it weren’t for the size of structures and scenery. The other reason for not switching to a larger scale is that probably 90% of commercial narrow gauge offerings are of Colorado protoype from the '20s and '30s. I don’t gain as much making a switch to On30 in increased commercial availability as one might think.
I understand fully. When I lived in Iowa, I had a 40’ X 15’ room that was dedicated to modelrailroad. My move here caused me to end up with 8’ X 7 1/2’ for a layout. My layout room also has to be shared with some of my 1/25 scale cars and trucks. My wife has her collection of HO scale passenger trains displayed near the cieling. I had no choice but to go with N scale. Most of my buildings are either scratchbuilt or kitbashed. The one plus that I do get from the small scale, is that I don’t have to detail the interiors. What I miss from HO scale is that natural sense that one could identify with it. It just seemed like the eyes said “This is real.”
Sorry Fred, I just noticed this thread, otherwise I’d have chimed in earlier.
Based on my own experience, I don’t think a 60" long cassette is too long or unwieldy in use, but of course you need to be the final judge of this. Building a mock-up will certainly help you to decide either way. My mate’s layout used cassetes that were 5’6" long, and we found them to be manageable by one peson. Rigidity is the goal for a cassete of this length. If it’s made of material such as aluminium or steel stud, that’s easily achieved. And the heaviest part of the whole thing will be the train in it.
Having alignment devices at either end will assist with placing the cassette accurately, these don’t have to anything complicated to be effective. My old layout had a lift out made of channel to connect it to the staging. This used short lengths of aluminium angle with the vertical leg bent slightly outwards to provide a lead-in.
If you want to power the track on the cassette, an easy method is to use the alignment device to conduct the current. The need for a good mechanical connection will also provide good electrical continuity, too. At different times I’ve used the angles themselves, or pattermaker’s dowels wired to the track bus.
You’ll probably feel more comfortable handling the cassette if it has some means of preventing trains from rolling out the ends. Again, it doesn’t have to be complicated - I’ve used soft foam cut slightly oversize so it’s a force fit in the channel, which works well.
My wife is away at the moment, and she has our camera, but when she returns I can post some photos for you if you like.
