Multi use layout

[Robsr]

I’m making a 360cm x 180cm (12ft x 6ft) layout.

It was originally going to be a tram layout but seeing as I’ve got the room I thought what the hell and go big or go home. 
it was going to have a “city” scene at one end, a “town” area at the other and a motive power / tram depot in the middle. 
I’ve got lots of Kato track and planned on doing an inverted figure of 8 around the outside for continuous running of two long trains. 
I’ve now decided to run 4 tracks around the outside to enable more trains to be run, 2 “local” and 2 “high speed tracks”.

I’m now thinking of just laying a near full circuit of viaduct on the baseboard  without pillars to give the impression of a high speed line but with ramps to lower the track to ground level to run through a station with the other 2 “local” tracks running through the station, giving the impression of four tracks between three platforms.

I realise that I only have myself to please but does anyone think it will look stupid or will it be acceptable?

If I lift up the “high speed track “ it means linking the two circuits will be a lot harder than doing so at ground level. 

Edited March 9, 2023 by Robsr

[bc6]

Your layout sounds interesting, I like the city portion and the yard portion as well. Personally I think 4 outside tracks are a bit busy lol the most I could deal with would be 3. Have you thought about how you would control all of this equipment DC or DCC and it sounds like s ton of wiring to boot. Like you said it's your layout and you run it the way you want to run it but those are a few pitfalls that I can see. Let us know what you plan to doing good luck.

[cteno4]

Robsr,

 

yes that’s a classic Japanese layout design with a raised viaduct/embankment shinkansen lines (they tend to do this to keep high speed tracks away from everything) and the ground level tracks for the local/express/freight. separation with height let’s you have tracks overlap. Some to not just have concentric rings. Also you have the space to even break the ground tracks for a bit and not have them parallel all the time. Wandering some helps break things up and bring scenery in more around the tracks. It’s good to set up track on the floor or some tables to get an idea of track patterns and how they look when running. 
 

one big issue with 12’x6” layout is that the center area will be really hard to get to to work on. You will have to have easy access all the way a round the layout. Reaching in past about 2’ for any length of time is almost impossible. With long arms you can reach in 3’ to grab a detailed car, you won’t be able to do a lot more. Past 24” you really need to use one hand many times for stability so you are left working with one hand. Popup hatches can work but are really hard to engineer in. You can also look at drop in scenery modules for the center areas but they can be hard to put in place/remove and hard to cover seams at a distance.

 

What is your room like? Could you think about putting like a 24” wide layout around the walls so it circles the room? This gives you a lot of length for trains to run and depth for scenes with just 4 tracks going through and the rest scenery like long slice of a city, rural, suburban, industry, yards, stations. You can make draw bridge or lift out sections for the door way tracks areas or just duck under. Center of the room can be nice for 360 view and have some roll around work tables that can roll under the layout on the wall when running trains to be out of the way.

 

with one large rectangle layout in the middle of the room it can be a challenge to fuse all the scenes well and deal with track patterns as they are more limited. Also forces you to keep walking around the layout to watch trains. With the ribbon approach it’s easier to transition scenes and since longer length is allowed wandering tracks and adding sidings, stations and yards is easier than in a rectangle in middle of room. Tram or small interurban train lines can do tighter radiuses so have loops in areas or do dog bone loop backs or point to point operations between scenes like urban and suburban or suburban to rural. With the ribbon approach you can make the layout in sections easier to construct and simple leg system or shelf brackets to wall or even sit in some modular roll around cabinets. It’s a lot easier to build a bunch of sectional modules and bolt together and support than a large free standing rectangle. Also easier if you ever have to move it and fit it into a new space.

 

other dean of a ribbon layout a a dogbone design where you have two like 4’x4’ ends (just at the limit for easy reach in) connected by like a 2’-3’ ribbon that could snake partway around the room. Each end section has bit loopback curves. This does mean your connecting ribbon has like 8 tracks running thru it, but some of those could be hidden by scenery. 
 

maybe play with some track planning software to see what could work in the space you have.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Robsr]

The layout has now been changed through necessity to a 15ft x 8ft layout with a well in the middle.
There will be a 8x3 board at each end joined by a 9ft section along each side. The depth is yet to be decided but will probably be 2ft each side. 
there will be two “high speed lines” around the outside, made using mainly the double viaduct sections.

Inside these will be a single continuous loop “local line” that will have two sidings either side of the station building to give me a local terminus within the station, similar to some stations where a branch line meets a main line.

This means I can run a full Eurostar and inter city 125 on the high speed line and my three 3 and 5 car sets on the branch line. 

I’m thinking of raising the passenger lines so that I can run two freight lines inside but run through a tunnel under one length where I can make storage sidings that will be hidden from the centre but still be accessible from the outside.

What’s left of the 8x3 areas will form the cityscape and rural areas but still allow room for trams to run between both areas, similar to the Blackpool system.

Instead of leaving the motive power / tram depot in the middle I will now try any make it as a set of sidings on one of the long straights.

All electrics will be DC as I’m old school and haven’t got the patience to learn about DCC or the money to pay for it. 

[cteno4]

Sounds good. Reach in from both sides makes things really easy to work on and different ways to watch the layout!

 

jeff

[Robsr]

Jeff, can you recommend a website please for layout planning using Kato Unitrack? I’ve read on here that some are free up to a certain amount of pieces but I don’t mind paying as I’ll be laying a lot of track.

I’ve cut rolls of wallpaper to the size of the layout so it can be rolled up and am working my way through making copies of they track pieces using the remainder but it’s difficult to lay the paper out and put the track pieces on to see how the layout looks.

I know it sounds crazy but I always say it’s not stupid if it works. 
Thanks. 
Rob

[katoftw]

Anyrail is one I use

 

You new plans sound complex. Might be worth investigating Tomix for better flexibility, before you go too far.

Edited April 13, 2023 by katoftw

[Robsr]

katoftw. Why complex? Three outer loops for passenger traffic, possibly raised up. 
A minimum of two loops for freight inside with a freight yard if passenger loops are at “ground” level or sidings hidden inside a tunnel under the passenger loops if they’re raised with hand access from the outside of the layout. 
Two small loops, one at each end, for trams with track connections between the two for longer LTR running. 
5 train loops plus 2 tram loops. No problem whatsoever. 
I’ve had layouts like this in the past without any difficulties or problems. 

[cteno4]

Anyrail I think is the one that has limited free number of tracks to save a plan. It’s $59 so reasonably priced. Well liked. Pc only
 

I’ve used xtrakcad a lot over the years. It’s free and open source supported, but its Mac install can be a pita, windows easier. It’s also not super intuitive so you need to take notes as it’s the kind of program you will forget the details fast if you put it aside for a while. But with some notes you can get going quickly again after a hiatus. My main program now is railmodeler. It’s Mac only and at $45 it’s reasonably priced and very intuitive to use, pretty powerful and it’s been well maintained over the years. I used 3rd planit a lot way back but it’s really a whole 3D layout builder and I rarely used many of its features and is pc only. Also like $175. Really is a full 3D cad system.

 

it’s good to mess with ideas on planning software and then go play with them with real track and then go back and forth to refine things. Butcher paper is a good way to mess with track physically and make a quick plan from. On caution I would have is playing with track plans physically on the floor is very different view than at table/eventual layout height. I noticed this years ago when we set up one of our original JRM build on the fly layouts on the ground and then shortly after on the modules at actual display height. Really changed some of the things we liked and didn’t like. Working on the floor is about the same as in software you are looking straight down at it. Software of course also hard as it’s tiny and hard to imagine it at real size. This is why I always caution setting up parts of a software layout in real life as it helps get a crosswalk set up in your brain from looking from the top on a small screen to looking more angled from the side at real life size. You start to notice the things to avoid doing which can look great on plan view but suck at real size. It also helps you realize when you are getting too much track and it becoming the spaghetti bowl look.

 

also when playing at real size you can plop some structures in place. If you don’t have many then try using small boxes or crudely tape together some cardboard buildings or even print out some free pdf cardstock buildings (pm me I have a big folder of them) and just cut out with scissor and tape up quickly. You can make hills and such by just taping up balls of newspaper or plopping some books or boxes down and drape a towel over them. Even some bits of colored construction paper for fields, roads, concrete can really pop in your minds eye what you really like and works. Again really helps you envision the final views and can really help in the track planning. You can actually do this in software with programs like 3rd planit, but it takes an enormous amount of time and skill and it’s still looking at a screen. Very different than seeing something real even if not as “pretty” as cad is. I’ve seen architectural spaces be designed by cad only, never a hand sketch or model. Nice pretty fly throughs and the you wal thru the actual finished space and it’s dead. Maybe a couple of nice views but many many bad views as they were off the fly throughs and 360 and those were in a bloody screen or 

VR (they ain’t holodecks) which is never the same as walking around as a human and that is how the space will be used it’s whole life.

 

way back in early JRM days we didn’t have enough track to play with all the layout we were planning, so we just traced out needed pieces on corrugated cardboard and cut them out quickly. We then just used drafting tape to lock them in, shoving the unijoiner into the cardboard. Helped us make sure we were happy with final plans 1:1 and allowed some final refinements before we purchased the remaining track needed.

 

even first just doing some scribbles on paper with colored markers for different tracks. It’s sad the old Kato template is long oop (I have one here somewhere but not seen it in years) as it helped quickly pencil out stuff. But you could cheat. Just print out a scale outline of your table top then figure out rough radius at scale and use a regular circle template (many are at 1mm increments) to use to do rough 90 and 180. This way you can do something fast and get it roughly right it will fit (when hand sketching a lot of the time you end up drawing way too tight of radiuses). Then you can quickly mock up a few different ideas quickly on the big level and spread them out on the table to compare. Once you zero in then start laying it out in track planner.

 

this is a big layout so also think about phases and do main loop first then add in other loops a bit later or yards, can help spread out the costs and also not overwhelm you on a big project at once! Since your high speed elevated line may be the biggest focal point build that first and tweak its shape if you want it to move in/out some to break up too much of solid oval like making it go at angle for a stretch and maybe one corner it’s 90s from the rear of one side. Then mess with your ground tracks once high speed is set to figure out the best path for them in relation to the high speed lines and scenery and buildings.

 

sorry my professional background is in exhibit design and we do this sort of from sketch to models to drafting plans loop a lot and my design mentor hammered into me the item of testing things in 3D scale models and many times all the way to 1:1 cardboard mock-ups. This even as even though he was a master at visualization in his head (he worked in the Eames office when young) he learned from Eames to mock things up to test them out and do refinement loops. 3D cad has lulled designers into it can all be done in 3D and maybe a final 3D test print, but that cuts out so many of the important intermediate loops ro get to the right design.
 

you can run trains happily with dc! One of our club members has a huge Unitrak layout and 15 throttles! I know that makes dcc folks puke, but he is happy with it and it works great for him.

 

jeff

[katoftw]

10 hours ago, Robsr said:

I’ve had layouts like this in the past without any difficulties or problems. 

Sorry. Your previous line of questioning made you sounds like a modelling rookie. Keep on doing what your doing then, since you have done it before.