I grew up with an older brother who was a Fireman and then an Engineer on the New York Central (NYC) (Then Penn Central, then Amtrack, Conrail and ending on Metrorail.) Hudson Division. I grew up next to the tracks on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). I am considering building a strange layout. I plan an 8’ X 8’ layout with a divider down the center. On one side will be the LIRR as in my home town, in HO and on the other side a NYC Yard in N Guage. I plan to run a loop of both gauges through the other side just to extend the mainline. I would appreciate any advice for this layout. I also am trying to locate locomotives, steam a few early diesels, and electric in late 1940’s and 1950’s style for both lines, especially the LIRR which is very hard to find. Any and all advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Interesting idea.
Be careful about being able to reach into the layout. 8x8 with a divider means it will be 4’ from the edge to the back of each side… thats hard to reach. Typically it is recommended to keep that distance down to about 2’.
Also, based on my own experience, I would recommend maybe trying to do one of those two projects first. You will be surprised how much time it can take to complete even a modest layout as I am finding with my current 32"x60" n-scale project.
Chris
If you do an 8 x 8 donut with table a 30" wide and a backdrop around the center, you could do 4 scenes pretty easily.
On the other hand If you can fit an 8 x 8 table into your room and be able to walk around it, you have room for at least a 13 x 13 around the walls shelf layout which would have easy access in the center and you wouldn’t have to continuously walk around following your trains from side to side.
While dual scales sound fun. I’ve never seen them work well together. You could have two levels, one each scale.
t:
It sounds very ambitious, to say the least. If you’re really just starting out in this, why don’t you build one of the 4 x 8 sides first, and then decide if you really want more. I would suggest starting with the hometown-scene side, and HO scale. The main reason is that the other side is intended to be nothing but a yard.
While yards look nice in the magazines, it doesn’t take a huge yard to operate a modest model railroad, and if the yard is too big, it ends up being mainly static storage. Yards are costly to build and costly to populate with equipment, if you don’t want it to look like a bland field of track. Yards have a lot of track to clean and a lot of switches and switch machines that can break down. I’m not against yards at all; I like them a lot, but I do think a yard should be a working part of a model railroad.
You could, of course, have a model railroad where the yard work was the whole point. If that’s what you really want, and it might well be, then I’d start
To address one item only, the PRR G-5s 4-6-0 and the PRR H-9s 2-8-0 (Bowser, ex Penn Line, in HO) are prototypical for the LIRR into the 1950s. I remember seeing a yardful of G-5s at Flushing in mid-morning (after the commuter rush) in the early '50s, and found a lone 2-8-0 (actually an H-10, which was the same engine with 1" larger cylinder diameter) switching industrial trackage nearby.
Finding LIRR or NYC motors will probably be an adventure, in any scale. Electric traction has been largely ignored by the hobby’s suppliers.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I was thinking of having each guage come and go subteranean at the divider. I could do all sorts of nifty stuff in the lower level and detail wouldn’t matter. I do have one G-5, that’s the one I got to ride on and drive as a boy. I would wait at Carle Place and they would take me to Westbury,(my home Town) in the morning. Then I would be waiting at Westbury in the afternoon and they would take me to Carle Place. The two stations were about 10 miles apart. Quite a thrill for a kid.
If you are a “Super Newbie” planning a 8’x8’ layout, I assume that this is a 13’ x13’ room at least. I would go for an around the room “G” shaped layout. I happen to be helping to construct a G shaped layout (for our Historical Museum), of approximately 13’x13’ dimensions. One should never have to reach more than 30" from the edge of the layout. I happen to have a 24’x24’ garage loft layout with an inside stairway, so that I can have an around the room layout. But, you can have a lift panel access to a room throuh a door, or build a G, or C shaped layout, with a door entrance. I have two towns built on Luan, for lift-out access to places that are, otherwise, inaccessable. I happen to have enough room for two “7 track yards”, but a 3 or 4 track yard offers great switching possibilities. A typical ladder set of turnouts to a yard, take up a lot of trackage space. I happen to have a double track access to a pass through yard. Double slip switches within the yard require only one switch machine, and require much less space for cross-overs. It also allows the switch engine to have access to any track, and an escape route if pulling a string of freight cars into the yard. Along one wall of my layout there is a fairly wide river harbor, with a large car ferry and ore boat. At present, I am making a cut bank “shelf” along one side of the river for an HO track. Behind it is a 2"x2" raised causeway for an N guage train. To create perspective, on the wall behind the N guage is a 8 foot(SceniKing) banner photo of farmland and distant hills. One thing that all of us suggest is to “do one bit at a time”. My own layout started out as a “dogbone”, which evolved to a “C”, then evolved to an around the room “double G”. I hope that these ideas (accumulated over 7 years of preplanned c
What’s the shape and size of your room Tegemu? I think we can make better suggestions if we know that detail.
You may very well do better with a G shape. You could make it bi-level with the smaller N-scale on top and HO on the bottom. It might even look good that way.
Karl