I see so many great designs posted and fine-tuned on this forum, resulting in a nice polished layout plan. For all you designers - as you finish the designs, why not take a couple minutes to post the design on Layout Depot. This will make it so easy for others to find and benefit from your hardwork and lessons learned. Even if you just like to design layouts for fun, with no intention of building them - your concepts will inspire others. Go crazy, post away. Peter
Well, I draw plans using old-fashioned #2 pencil and graph paper, and nobody's complained about that...
A file created in Paint and saved as a GIF or JPG is perfectly acceptable - I have created a non-software specific category for them to appear in called "Hand-Drawn". You simply would not upload the CAD/equivelant file, but could certainly post all the other details including the Paint file. Absolutely nothing wrong with this either - in fact, if you have a scanner, you can scan and upload that sketch as a GIF or JPG as well, just like I explained above. Thanks for the great ideas! Peter
What's the difference between a "layout" and a "design"? How do I judge the difficulty level of a layout that hasn't been built?
Great questions! A layout gives the ability to tell about your entire pike, where the design is for just the design file. A design file can certainly be a subpart of the layout info being displayed). Designs have been part of Layout Depot for years, where the Layouts are only about a year old. The addition of layouts was to give modelers a way of sharing their layout (history, operations, photoes, prototype, etc) without having to learn complex HTML (the language web sites are coded in). Not every modeler has the technical knowledge of getting a site online, or has a place to put it. RE: difficulty - when designing the plan, you usually have a pretty good idea of the operations behind the schematics. A "Timesaver" design could be difficult, and an oval with a siding could be easy (at the two extremes). You wouldn't need to build the layout to know this. Just take a guess based on the objectives you used when coming up with a plan. Peter
So, a "layout" is only for layouts that have been built? That's the impression I got from looking at the site. I assumed "difficulty" meant "difficulty to build". For example, a helix would mean fairly advanced...
