I’ve been reading through threads here for weeks and now feel I have some questions.
First my background. I’m a thirty year old male, in Ontario… no model train experience. I mean none. Always been haunted by a train set I had as a kid that never worked. I remember just looking at the trains piled in a box. Thought its a good time to look into this. Now, I’ve been taking advice from the forums and am reading everything I can, to try and get a little bit of a handle on this vast hobby.
I am fortunate that a great hobby shop is right in my neighbourhood. I’ve been making weekly visits just to look at all of the inventory. Finally bought my first set the other day. Atlas oval track with two switches, MRC tech 4 220 controller, an Athearn middle of the road loco, two cars and a caboose (Athearn BB kits). So far having a lot of fun running in circles.
My questions.
I found the thread in this forum suggesting a newbie section for basic questions. I think this would be great. That thread is locked so I couldn’t pipe in there, but I really lack all of the basic knowledge that many of you have developled years ago. Is there a good place to go for basic knowledge such as, different switch types, how to uncouple cars, how to maintain locos, troubleshooting derailments and on and on?
I have my oval on a 4x8 sheet of plywood and had planned on quickly expanding this. I read the thread on the limitations of 4x8 layouts and could not pipe into that thread because it is also locked. Many suggested alternate type of layouts along a wall. I already see the advantage to this since I cannot reach the one turnout switch on the other side of my 4x8. Having no experience, where would one find track plans for this alternate type layout?
Finally any advice, tips, websites, or literature for a brand new guy is greatly appreciated. I have a lot of learning to do.
Welcome to the forums Chad. This forum is just for full size trains. There is another forum for model trains (which is currently having problems) you can reach though this link. It should be back to normal sometime Monday. http://www.trains.com/community/forum/default.asp?CAT_ID=8
Welcome to the forums. There are many sites that have trackplans. If I were you, I’d just do a google search for HO track plans and see what comes up. When I decided to build my latest N Scale layout, that’w what I did and found a ton of plans. To me, this was the most fun phase of starting a layout. Since you have a good hobby shop, buy some magazines. Lost of good ideas there. Atlas has several good layout books too.
Good luck, and have fun!
don’t forget to look for tutorials and other links
We should here back from you in about a month You will need that long to look through all these sites and there links as well trains.com has many educational articles
You will probably want to move this thread over tomodel railroad ->Layouts and layout building once the problem of topics being locked is resolved you’ll probably get much more attention there.
Lynn
chad
first welcome to the forums!!! atlas has many books for those starting out on layouts.two simple rules keep it simple and rule #2 the layout will never be done.good luck and have fun.
stay safe
Joe
Another guy from Ontario, welcome aboard. We are just starting to get into the show season so I would recommend attending a few. Looking at the club layouts is always good for ideas.