Mine is in my basement.
I assume yours is in a garage, a spare bedroom, or some other room in your house.
Anyone use an attic for his layout?
What I really wonder is whether anyone has a separate structure or outbuilding where the layout is maintained.
So, where is your layout?
Rich
Spare room, so you were right in my case.
No basements in Queensland.
Which spare room? Bedroom, den, living room?
Basement.
Tom
Larger of the two bedrooms in my apartment.
–Randy
We added a garage some years back, with a train room as the second floor. It came out too nice, and became a family room with a section for the trains. Now that my daughter has gone to college, I’m slowly re-claiming territory. It’s a great space - large, well lit, carpeted floor, heat and air conditioning. I still share it with the large family TV and some couches. That lets me work on the layout and watch football on Sundays at the same time. I get a lot of ballasting done that way.
Here in the Mid Atlantic most people have basements, so that is were most of the other modelers I know have their layouts.
But I live in a 110 year old house, and the basement is not really suitable for model trains - even after we did a lot of work to it. It has a low ceiling, lots of ductwork, heating pipes, boiler, oil tanks, well pump and tank, water conditioner, A/C air handler, support posts, electric panels, etc, etc.
So my layout space is in a room above my detached garage. The garage is 32’ x 40’ with a 12/12 pitch roof to match the house.
This provides a 22’ x 40’ room, with angled upper walls like an attic, for my train room. It is fully insulated, it has osb sheathing on the walls rather than drywall to allow easy attchment of the layout structure. It is fully heated and cooled by a propane furness and A/C unit in the “attic” space above the the layout room.
I designed the building specifily for all the purposes it serves and supervised its constructiion.
It only has two windows, one front, one back, set pretty high off the floor, nearly 5 feet.
The lower level of the garage houses our two cars, garden tractor and my workshop.
My model train workshop area is in the house, in the basement.
My layout was originally screwed in place, built attached to the walls/floor. But currently I am rebuilding it into moveable modules because we do not plan to retire here - so the layout needs to be able to go with me. I have past the point in this hobby were I have any desire to start over - I will not tear down and throw out any more layouts.
So, I may “complete” a new version before we move, or I might not - but in any case whatever modeling I do get completed will travel to the new retirement house and it will be selected or custom built to have a suitable space for the layout.
That may be a basement, or another custom building such as I have now.
Sheldon
In my basement separated by a wall and doorway from my cabinet making workshop
Two car attached garage.
Mine is in the extra living room. I have half of a 22x14 room with 18 foot ceilings. It’s not your typical layout room!
Mine is on the second floor of my house, in a living room that we don’t use, “as a living room”. Our house, before we bought it, was built in three phases, you see. The first was original structure. The second, out the back, was two story, with a family/dining room on the first floor, and the master bedroom/bathroom on the second. The third phase, out the front, was a two car garage on the ground level, and two bedrooms, full bath, laundry room, closet, and TV/family room. We are not much of a TV family, as we limit what our 8 year old son watches on TV. We also spend much of our evening in our master bedroom. My sons bedroom is on the “other side” we call it, because, as i stated one expansion out the back, and one out the front.
So, I’m slowly building an around the walls shelf style layout in the “TV” room. It’s on the second floor, inside, heat and air conditioning, hardwood/laminate flooring. The only bad thing right now, is the lighting is not good for a layout space. This can all be worked out at some point though. Just not a necessitiy at this time.
Spare bedroom that is also affectionately called the “junk room” as it is where we store what we don’t have space for elsewhere.
Since trailers don’t have basements, neither the layout nor the “extra schtuff” has anywhere else to be.
We also have a 42" square layout in the Living ROom for the Christmas time layout.
[8-|]
The disappointing part of my layout is in the basement.
The nice part of the layout is still in my brain.
Dave Nelson
mine is in a building in the backyard 24 x 54
jeff
That’s hilarious![(-D]
My 4’ X 10’ layout is in a spare 10’ 6" X 9’6" bedroom which also serves as a computer room.
Basement…
In a separate finished room in our finished off (insulated, dry-walled, and painted) detached garage.
I’ve got the family room (see my post on the first page) but I did offer my wife the family room for her crafts and stuff in exchange for the basement. I was actually surprised she turned me down. I think she realized that the trains are actually a lot more attractive upstairs than all her clutter would have been, and she doesn’t have to straighten things up for company!
I’m glad it worked out this way. My train room is bigger. Still, every now and then I look at the basement and think about how I would have arranged a layout there.
My basement layout also shares a certain amount of space with my recording studio…which can get a little hectic here.