Is’nt this what all MRR’s want, a bunch of space???. Becareful what you wish for, you just might get it. So here goes.
The drawings are for a N scale railroad patterned off the SOO and Milwaukee Road along with the other railroads in and around Wisconsin thrown in during the 80’s to early 90’s era… They are done by Mike Collier, a freind I have made off another MRR forum. So there for I can not take credit for those. But the ideas are a joint venture between Mike and I.
A little backround… Finally the land manager, gave me right to the complete garage, as before it was half or maybe even less. But I digress. Through E-mails and instant messaging Mike and I conversed and what you see here is the result.
The order is staging level bottom, then the second level, then the top of course!!! 614 pieces of flex and 140 turnouts, the track will be laid. The Helices and staging take 332 pieces of flex, that leaves 282 pieces of cd 55 flex needed for visable trackage…
AM I CRAZY!!!
Well here are the drawings, see anything you don’t like, or could use a different idea, speak up. The dimensions are 17’ along the top wall, 20’-6" down the side and 18’ along the bottom.
Couple of questions,., what should be the distance between levels?? Also what is everyone’s prefrence as to the height of the top level??
As you can tell that is the staging level in the pic below. I might just make it parralell the wall instead of going in the penisula.
Here we have the first level of ops, or the second level. How ever you look at it. I love how Mike has added working live interchanges and junctions. I think he has a special touch for that.
One of the things that Iain rice impressed upon me is that there is a relationship between space/money/time that every modeler must come in tune with.
Large layouts are often doomed to failure because of the time or cost involved. It is simply too easy to become discouraged that when you have been working on a layout for two years and it is only marginally functional.
You can always build in phases. Plan for expansion, but make each phase operationally self-sufficient in the context with the rest of the layout.
If you did make the staging level parallel the wall instead of going on the peninsula, you could stager the staging yards so that you could have easier access to the yard in the back. The drawback to this arrangement is that you could not access both staging yards from the same location. No, your not crazy, just really lucky. Looks like a lot of fun!
I am with Spacemouse on this one, unless you have a lot of people helping you, just laying that much track and getting it running, and that many turnouts and getting controls to them and doing two helixes: that is years of work. In a garage in Texas? unless it is climate controled, that is a lot of woodwork to keep from twisting. If you have that much time and money, why not a better location than a garage?
Chip, as for time and money,I have more time than money. But after dicussing it with my family… we are setting a fixed train budget per month. I can get a box of cd 55 flex fer 198$.
But I do see where you are coming from about working in sections/phases. I had a 17 x 12 N scale layout, 1/4 sceniced and all the track in a year and half, and that when I was working 5 days a week, if not more.
There are some times that I work on the layout/trains for 14-16 hours a shot.
Art, I know this project will take years, rome was not built a day,lol and all great works of art are not done over night.LOL As for the garage, walls have insulation in them as does the ceiling. I just recently purchased a portable A/C-Heater unit for the space.
Another idea I had was to use one level fer ops and just make visable staging across the garage on a shelf. I do plan on hand laying the turnouts.
If any thing changes, I will keep posting progress or regresss.
I’m not so sure I’d discourage SooNScaler. Some guys really fly at it. Look at Alan B and all hes accomplished in under a yar I think. Malcom Furlow could really get things done too. I have freind who has rebuilt a Piper Tripacer including scratch building the wings, bought and refinished two 80’s Corvettes and built a hotrod Ford model A. I have other freinds who"ve had similar projects laying around for years. One guy has about 15 VWs that hes had for over 20. " Nope can’t sell em, gonna rebuild at least one and I need the parts."
So anyways SooNScaler if you lived closer I’d come over and help.[C):-)]
I’m not sure I’m discouragaing rather playing devil’s advocate and throwing the numbers out there. I have freind who has a large layout and it took 5 years of 5 people working to get it to the point they could run ops.
And using Furlow and Alan B as examples doen’t quite cut it. Their layouts are 1/10 this size. So if you use this analogy, he should be at Alan’s point in 10 years (and he plulled a lot from his old layout.)
I have no qualms about building a lifetime project. I just think it is more sensitible to build in phases and expand.
As the proud owner of a multi-level double-garage-filler (in twice-N scale: 1:80, aka HOj,) I have discovered two main ways to combat discouragement:
Be aware that building a garage-filler is an exercise in forest management, not a quick-shot all-annuals flower garden. You are looking at years (decades) of construction and detailing. If you are mentally prepared for that fact, it ceases to be a source of anxiety.
Get some wheels rolling, even if it’s just a single unit and a caboose on one length of flex. That also gives an incentive to do the electricals, get control panels built and test-run all the trackage as soon as the flex is anchored to the roadbed.
One trap to avoid is to do all of one thing before starting the next. For example, if your lowest-level staging isn’t going to use that peninsula, don’t build the peninsula benchwork until it’s actually needed. Not only do you not spend the time and money, but it will make getting around easier during the early phases of construction.
[At present, after 19 months of construction, I estimate my benchwork is 30% complete, my trackwork is approaching 10%, my electricals are about 5%, my scenery is zero (everything I’ve built so far is hidden trackage,) my % of built to operational trackage is 98% and my level of satisfaction is 100%. And, yes, trains are rolling!]
Chuck [modeling (the netherworld of) Central Japan in September, 1964)
My layout has 1/6 of the track and 1/7 of the turnouts in this large layout. All of my bench work, track and turnouts were done in about one month ( 7/28 to 9/04/06). Most of the buildings (left over from prior layout) were in place and basic landscape work was done in (one of - EDIT) the two “major” towns. In other words, the layout was sparse, but fully operational. By 11/03/06, 50 pounds of plaster was used to form the mountains (all of the hidden track was in fact hidden). During this time period (three months), I probably (did not punch a time clock) averaged 4-6 hours
C&O fan wrote that it took three persons working 4 mo. 1 night a week,thats about 192 man hours figuring 4 hr. work session. Or one guy working 8 hrs a day for 4.8 weeks. And your talking handlaid track too. WOW! A lot of work. I don’t think any individual would work that hard at a hobby, but just consider a job and the production you get from that. How 'bout these guys who pay a person to build their layouts. Are those guys production motivated. OK,OK I got carried away ,and I too just like the rest of you suffer from burnout, sometimes for months at a time. But some of us are motivated differently. I think another example of high motivation would be Bruce Chubbs layout, granted he had a crew of motivated folks, but it seems like his huge layout came together in remarkable time.
A bit OT, but, threads like this and a desire for a big layout/long trains has me thinking when the time/house comes, I am going to build NTRAK modules. Actually, I am thinking I can just start making modules anytime.
Money seems to be the one item no one wants to talk about in the hobby. We have no problem filling in space large or small but I wonder sometimes if a person who wants a railroad really comprehends the large amounts of time it takes to build one.
Sure, i could slap a 4x8 together in one day and have it running the next but it will take 10 years to finish it all.
One layout we built at the LHS took about 3 years give or take a few months to reach a state of completion. I think it was a 4x8 and it took 4-10 of us several saturdays every few weeks slowly proceeding on that one road.
I have a photograh series of a modular club here over the last few years where each year at the show, I would photo graph a module and it gets a little bit better each year… little by little.
Im fully convinced that one should be careful to plan and build what they can handle.
I agree. You might want to consider going at least partly modular and use one or two reverse loop or turnback modules at the ends of finished sections so you can do some operating as you expand.
First of all, he has approximately 400 square feet of space, but the layout is much less than that, I did a quick estimate and came up with about 120 square feet. Also, while I don’t have any figures to back this up, I believe that bigger layouts tend to cost less per square foot to build. The economy of scale helps some e.g., buying flex track 100 pieces at a time instead of 10 pieces at a time, but the biggest difference is that people just don’t try to squeeze in as much stuff per square foot. If someone has a certain amount of space to build a layout and that space is suddenly double, the first thing many people will do is lengthen their yards and passing sidings and the distance between towns. While that doesn’t affect the cost of the benchwork and base scenery, it does affect the cost of the track and buildings and additional details. I also believe larger layouts tend to take less time per square foot to build, for basically the same reasons.
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