well, ivan has passed and i have most of my clean up done. while waiting for a roofing contractor i've been workin' on the railroad. i have laid out a reverse loop on an incline 3 ways. it was all wrong on paper, only one way in and out of the loop. tonight i'll try agian. david pcola, fl
What they all said. My "plan" is to do crude sketches and then lay out the track based on a 30 yo memory of a plan, (plan # 10, “Pittsburg, Midvale, and Ironton” on page 14 in Kalmbachs 101 Track Plans), I'll add that since I'm planning a double or tripple level I will do card board mock ups per Pete Nolan's advice. As my father put it: "That is why they put erasers on pencils” and I paraphrase, “That is why they put delete keys on computers” We shall see. My father would be aghast at knowing I’m not going to use a grid paper, compass, and straightedge to plan this. I may live to regret it. [ March 05, 2005, 05:59 PM: Message edited by: Grey One ]
Like most of you have said, I am creating my "mushroom" layout without a track plan and so far am just laying the track where it looks like it is supposed to go. There is some odd tweaking needed to get things running smoothly
Greetings all Like many others, I have done both, but When I moved to canada, I thought I would only have a space 6x3 for a layout, and I spent nearly 8 months just on the design.. OK I was happy with the design, but yikes. Then I got given a spare room to play in 12ft square and I reckoned the planning would take me longer than building the layout.. So I did it the other way.. I decided on what sides of the room certain features would be.. like, river valley, main station, branch terminus, staging yards and industries, and then started laying track. Mostly, I designed the scenery first then started threading tracks through it.. isn't this the way real railroads did it Its now a real.. track is here.. valley is there.. industry is there, what links do I need layout.. But I am happy Regards
For me, layout design of my layout has been a function of "on the job training." Initially I planned the mainline only with an idea of what areas could handle what. So for example, "this area" was large enough to host my passenger yard. But then as I built and gained experienced, I discovered that some areas weren't suitable for what I had in mind, turn outs and curves were demanding mistresses. So most of the layout was done on the fly, except for the mainline plan. If I were to do another layout now, I could accomplish more on paper as I would have a better sense of what could fit and what wouldn't fit. Tastes also change over time and the paper plan usually grows old as the design palatte expand and refine. So building a larger layout slowly, especially if it is your first larger layout is often a good thing since you can count on some major changes of the track plan, often after the track is in.
