Hi, everyone. Well I just got my layout room finished, with a new floor, and new lighting. Walls are all painted sky blue, with all hand painted clouds. Now I am ready to start my layout. My question is; Has anyone ever built bench-work,that best fits the layout room first, and then design the track plan to fit on the bench-work. Pretty much everything I read seems to indicate in making a track plan first. If anyone ever done B/W first and T/P second. I would like to know how it all worked out, and what set backs I can expect
The following is a cut and paste from earlier this week. It tells my story and I had the same ideas as you about benchwork first. I got lucky and it worked out great. Please excuse the rerun post though.[:)]
Okay so I get my 15’ x 24’ room. Move the Grand Piano out of it one day to the living room while the wife is at a dog show for a few days. I rub my hands in glee, grab my two foot by three foot graph paper and away we go.
Well actually let me backtrack a bit. I had my plan done before the above happened but it wasn’t easy to settle on a plan. I had three doors a six foot wide entrance area a large window and a fireplace to deal with. I could not make a track plan fit this room and work no matter WHAT!!! Grrrrrrr…
I decided to think a little outside the box. I thought if I drew up my benchwork to take up as much of the room as possible while allowing me to move about easily and still be a nice room to be in, that might be the way to go. In real life the railways had to build to the geography. The land came first. I drew up a half dozen benchwork only plans and settled on one. The trackplan was designed to fit the benchwork and went onto my flat earth with very little tweaking. This is the complete opposite of how it is suppose to be done. I am delighted with how it has turned out.
Wow!! your train room is very much like mine 24’ x 16’ fireplace and all except my fireplace is all brick from floor to ceiling with no mantle. I covered the top half of the brick with a peace of masonite and painted it with rest of walls. the bottom half won’t be seen because of the bench-work. Yours looks great, and thanks for the info. I’ll try to get some pictures out soon.
I think I would want a general idea of my layout first. Where is a good place for a yard, a large industry I want, special scenery like a river or mountain. A rough track plan that would fill those basic placements would be very beneficial. If you have an encumberance in the room, door, window, appliances or the like, you will want to figure them in. A narrow section at the door, so you can have a simple gate. Narrow in front of a window or access benind the benchwork so that you can open the window. Just building a place to run trains, then figure out where things are going, you could find you have three things you want on the layout to go in wide spots and only two spots wide enough.
Yep, I did. But I think you need to have a pretty specific idea of the topography you’ll be modeling. I model the midwest with just a small portion of below track scenery. Where to locate streams and bridges had to be planned precisely. The rest is mostly flat, so most scenery elements can be made by piling up materials on the benchwork. I had a good idea of the plan going in but playing with track angles and building locations in the flesh allowed me to relocate spurs and such as I laid it out. I found that helpful.
It probably depends on the size of your room too. With, say, a 12x12 room, you could probably just build a 24 inch ribbon of shelving around the room and figure you’ll be maximizing the space with little alternatives. OTOH, a large basement has more alternatives and would require more planning.
I’m now in the process of adding to the benchwork by building blobs at each end for turnback loops and a long continuous run. Just added two modules and more legs, and installed an access hole in the blob that’s in a corner and relocated the backdrop in front of the hole. That major renovation would have been best if it was thought out ahead of time, but I did’t realize how much I wanted continuous running prior to building the benchwork. It operates as point-to-point, but only after I had all of the track loosely laid and wired up and operating did I realize how much I missed having the continuous run option.
I did a benchwork design first, then worked on a track plan to fit. The track plan was not locked in stone because things change as you are laying track. You think of things to add, or some things you thought would work, don’t, and have to be changed on the fly. I think the best way to go is design the benchwork first, then the mainline, main yard, and loco facilities if you are going to have them. Passing sidings, towns, and industries can be worked in as you lay track for the mainline.
I’ve worked the layout build both ways over the years, but found that in my case, the room size dictates the layout size, and my benchwork footprint was designed to maximize RR space in the given area. Right now I’m building my second layout in a 15 x 11 room, which is smaller than I would like, so I really needed to know what the max size layout was that I could get away with. It turned out (as before) to be an oval with the operations area in the center, accessed by a big duckunder.
Once I had the outline of the footprint scaled down on paper, I made a lot of copies and played with track plans until I came up with what suited me best. By the way, whichever method works best for you, TAKE YOUR TIME as there is nothing more disheartening than a “do over”.
a switching layout, or a layout fit for continuous running need quite different footprints. You should really have an idea about the kind of railroad you want.
If not, you probably end up with bench-work, not suited to your wishes; besides the most important features are the minimum radius and the frog number.
We need location, era and the kind of railroad first. Like a switching layout in the 70"s in Miami or little trains running through the Rockies in the 30"s or passenger hotshots along the Mississippi in the 50’s
The kind of railroad has a large impact on radii and switch numbers, so on the footprint as well. Adding a scale drawing of the space you have would be a good first step.