We will be moving next year and my 5 x 9 HO indoor layout will be discarded; not (at all) built for moving. It will get dismantled after the holidays, and I have sold off most of the rolling stock, retaining 4 favorite locos and limited rolling stock. I will donate the structures to the local museum / club, which they will sell.
Our new home (to be built) will be smaller and I will not be able to build in the interior. I’m not at all sure I want to undertake another full layout build in any case, but I’ll ask for comments for advance thinking:
There is a modular club near where will build (Denton, TX) and that might be the easiest way to stay involved. I would have room in the garage to build and store one or more modules. That is my leaning, other than not building at all.
Another option would be to build a modest layout in the garage, either a 5 x 9 or a point to point (odd for a Big Boy and GTEL turbine). I’m particularly interested in comments on this. In our current TX garage, I note that a lot of dust and dirt finds its way in, even thought the doors are almost always closed. With DCC & sound, I know that loco / track contact is important, so I’m wondering if folks have successfully built and run a garage layout. (I’m not interested in a pulley system to raise it up, but that’s not the issue.). I’m thinking that a small garage layout should be kept simple, to make vacuuming the track arrangement a quick task. I also have John Allen car and CMX car. How successfult is it?
If you “seal” your modules nicely, they won’t collect any dust while being stored in the garage. As opposed to an “open” layout.
But you’ll have to decide how much you yearn to be able to run trains at home. If you set up the modular layout 4 times a year, then there’s a lot of no-train-running.
You might have just one module indoors, where you can use it as a test track and play sometimes, assuming you have any room.
Or, out in the garage, you can have one module that you can easily open up (and close up) to do the same.
Besides possible dust in a garage, there can be an extreme heat range. Might be a problem.
Will you model building bench be inside the house or in the garage?
I got into HO with an around the wall garage layout at 14 years old in 1951 and continued with three more garage layouts including my present 10’ x 14’ layout.
While it would have been nicer to have a layout in the house I never had the opportunity. When we moved to Bakersfield we had never experienced tremendous heat in the garage before. The 105° heat caused a problem with expansion of the rails and I lost all the track in my 32” radius helix. The expanding rails broke the spikes off five 36” sections of Atlas Flex track.
The garage wasn’t insolated when we moved in and R30 insulation took care of the problem. The insulation brought the inside temps down to 84° with the outside at 110°.
Since I fixed the heat problem the only problem has been dirt. Unfortunately Bakersfield is located in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley and we get bombarded with fallout from the Bay Area SMOG. But my CMX track cleaner to the rescue with ACT-6006 about once a month and everything works great.
I have a garage layout that is20+ years old and it shows dust on the scenery,buildings and coal ballast,however I have few problems with trains stalling. I use a Walthers track cleaner car now and then and have found using all metal wheels keeps the rails clean. The garage is insulated with electric heater for winter comfort.
As others have noted, getting the garage as comfy as possible before layout building is very important. First off I insulated, sheet-rocked and added a ceiling to my garage. Everything then got a coat of paint.
Anything that mitigates the entry of hot and cold, dust and dirt is worth doing. Had a well sealed sectional garage door installed and added a threshold to the side entry door.
Regardless, grime is going to find a way in and onto the layout, especially when sharing the space with the family car. Sealing the concrete floor with an epoxy coating has helped, so too adding roofs to the layout valances.
The time, effort and cost has paid off over the years. Certainly not as cozy as having an indoor layout. But now the garage is a much more inviting and comfortable place, and not just for the trains, but for other hobbies, projects and tinkering too.
Other than having to share my garage layout with critters, and the extremes of both heat and cold, but also of humidity (swings from very dry to very damp), I now have my layout in our garage. It’s a double wide, unfinished. My wise wife and contractor buddy waited until I was driving my snowbird dad down to Indio, CA, for the winter. Unbeknownst to me, they framed off about one third of the garage, a bit more actually, and provided me with an insulated, sealed, and ready-to-be-drywalled train room of 9X24. I would not have considered a train room in the unheated garage, out in the open, where we get 130" of rain between the middle of October and the end of March each year. In fact, I run a dehumidifier pretty much 24/7 unless I see the ambient dip below 45%, in which case I turn it off and put open pans of water in there.
The humidity and heat are terrible for wooden benchwork, but foam insulation board will help as the surface for your tracks. Then, it will only be the heat you’ll have to worry about. And the critters.
I forgot a few things until I read a few of the replies. I also insulated the metal garage door with blue foam board and went with 2’ carpet tiles on the floor.
The house was a show home and the walls and ceiling were finished sheetrock, popcorn ceiling. The garage had been carpeted and was the sales office for the subdivision. The only thing that they didn’t finish was the insulation in the attic over the garage. The first owner of the house removed the office carpet and parked his Vet in the garage.
The carpet tiles are perfect for a garage hobby area, easy to wash when you spill stuff on them.
As mentioned above the critters are a problem but a bug bomb once a month keeps them at bay. The micro spiders love my HO scale trees.
All in all the garage is a perfect hobby room for my layout. A plus is I built my layout on casters so it is easy to clean the garage. When I roll it out on to the driveway to clean the garage it becomes a neighborhood kid and dad magnet.
I built a detached garage for the first house we owned, but don’t recall ever using it as a garage. It was useful for storing bikes and kids outdoor stuff, and I also managed to fit in a small, well-insulated room that I used mostly as a paint shop for model railroading stuff.
I also built our current home, but there wasn’t sufficient room for an attached garage, which suited me just fine. A couple of years later, we bought the older house next door, but before we re-sold it, severed a large portion of its lot, much of it which extended behind our property and also partially behind the house on the other side of us, along with a considerable amount behind the house being sold.
That parcel included a two-bay, storey-and-a-half “garage”, located about 100’ behind our house.
At one time, apparently over 100 years ago, it was a house, and looks like sometime later it was a barn, then eventually used as a garage for the older house that we sold.
It’s now over 150 years old, and in rough shape. I keep hoping that a tree will fall on it, or the wind blow it over, just so I could replace it with a decent yard shed, and maybe a small workshop for outdoor projects.
I can’t imagine having a train layout in a garage, but I have imagined it in a fully serviced outbuilding (heat, hydro, and plumbing), as I have a couple of American friends with rather large layouts in outbuildings.
You say your down-sizing building your new house, …Perfect! Not a better time to switch to N scale. There would be plenty of room for that new smaller layout in the wife’s walk-in-closet. You know, the one where she wants to put all her shoes. You could build her some shoe racks that go right under the layout. Now everybody’s happy[(-D]
If that don’t fly, you could put your layout in the living room like I did[:-^] I really did! I have some interesting priorities and an easy-going wife[bow] I don’t like watching TV at night and my wife does. This way were both doing our own thing and still have our short time of the day together in the evenings.
On a more all-around serious note Paul. I wouldn’t put an expensive hobby like a layout in the garage unless it was a sealed climate controlled environment. Quite doable, a lot of guys have that. I’ve seen man-caves that are nicer than the house.
Here’s one I was working on a friend hired me to do. Those cabinets were the most difficult part of the job. I usually throw the directions over my shoulder but they had 17 miilion hardware parts[:^)] The epoxy floor looked like Italian leather.
This guy owns ‘ELEANOR’ [:P] which was the only car worthy to be parked in that garage when I was done.
Never had a garage layout in Texas, but I have had them other places.
In Seattle there’s basically no dust because it rains so much, but temperature swings can be a problem. Dealing with that was easy, and I filled 2/3 or a 2-car garage with a layout and had no major problems.
In Lompoc CA the climatge is very mild and it’s much drier, so there was more dust, but it isn’t very windy, so there was not a lot of dust infiltration. I parked the car next to the layout, and would often work on the layout with the garage door open (really nice weather there!). No major problems there either.
Texas might have big issues with garage layouts, as you’ve mentioned. I’d talk with folks at the club and ask any members with garage layouts how they handle things. Might not be as difficult as you’re thinking.
The only available place in our house for the type of layout that I want is in the garage. We are in Southern Ontario so the temperature and humidity changes fairly significantly throughout the year, but the garage is insulated and drywalled so the temperature changes in there are more moderate. The doors seal quite well. The only time I have a significant dust problem is when I am using my radial arm saw, although I’m sure that normal dust will build up on the layout over time.
What I want to do is design a cover for the 5’ 4" x 12’ layout that can be removed easily by one person. I have a couple of ideas but nothing firm just yet. One idea is to build a removable frame system over which I could place a sheet of plastic, maybe with some weights on the edges of the plastic to keep it in place.
My current layout is in a garage that’s in the beasement of the house. This might not be the same situation since the garage door is seldom used.
Dust isn’t a problem.
Comfort can be an issue in these cold months. I have a space heater now and through about February.
The summer heat isn’t a problem since its in a basement with the door facing east.
Its a nice area, but having said that, I’m going to make every effort to have my next layout in a finished space. A properly heated and airconditioned space is still more desireable than what I have.
Dave, to keep it light and simple, and fast, why not just an old bedsheet drop cloth? Tie the corners to four small Canadian Tire brass pulleys, with string, and put the pulleys in a track system, two parallel tracks. Lift one end, tie off. Go to the other end, lift, slide the pulleys down the track to the first set of pulleys, tie them off, and you have full overhead light (no canopy of bedsheet). No need for a heavier and more costly frame of any kind.
I’m thinking that I would like to be able to take the dust shield completely away from the layout including any support framing. To keep things light and strong I am considering using fiberglass tent poles for the frame. Assuming I can find the right lengths, I should be able to form four or five bow shaped arches over the layout, over which the dust cover can be draped. I still haven’t figured out how to make the dust cover easy to handle, but I’m thinking of making it in three or four pieces which can be held together with small magnets similar to the way that dust control doorway covers are designed.
It’s all floating around in my foggy brain right now. The layout won’t be at the stage where a dust cover is required for at least two or three years so I have time to cogitate on it. Please keep the suggestions coming.
Cheers!!
Dave
Edit: I had a quick look on Amazon for tent poles and they are relatively cheap. I also discovered camping trailer covers which would fit nicely over the whole layout, and they are inexpensive too. They are also much more substantial than plain plastic sheeting and I suspect that they might be less prone to developing static electricity too. The fog is clearing a bit!
Had a 21x8 layout in a moble home garage( all metal) in central Florida. Insulated the walls, ceiling was already insulated, did run a 12" trunk a/c from the house HVAC. a/c would keep the summer temp in the low to mid 80’s in the summer, I actually blocked off 3/4ths of the outlet as a trade off between temp and electrical costs. Shut the trunk offf in the winter(or what we called winter). Never had any problem with expansion, and after gleaming the rails locos ran well, only an occasional spot cleaning of the rails. It was an ideal setup for me. Live in Ohio now and have no layout.
My last layout was in a garage, and while it certainly saw huge temperature & humidity swings, I never had the problem of track buckling or pulling apart. Probably luck as much as anything. What I did find was that without climate control, half the year was either too hot or too cold to stand being out there for any length of time.
Temps where I lived with the garage layout got as low as zero and as high as 95 or so F. Humidity was so high in the summer you could cut the air with a knife and very dry in the winter. I didn’t gap my track as it was my first layout and I didn’t know about gapping. In the winder the solder joints actually broke apart and in the summer the track kinked in some places.
James Wright moved, to TN I think, and is building a layout in his garage. He said he was doing videos on a competitor to MR’s video site. I have not researched it further.
