Hello all,
I am planning my ultimate layout and I have a few problems to overcome!
I think space isn’t really the issue, the main problem I have is that I simply have too many interests.
I love railways from all around the world and so I have collected models from the UK, America and European countries.
I’m only at the earliest design stage as my future house isn’t built yet! The layout will be in a basement underneath the future house.
Well I have considered numerous options simply for the shape of a new layout and I guess the simplest thing is to show you;
I should be able to have a portion of an area of 100 square meters, I have to divide the whole thing into my wife’s hobby area, my own hobby area and a decent sized workshop.
Fortunately, my wife is very understanding and suggested that I take an ‘L’ shaped portion of the basement - this would give me approximately 10m x 10m or say, 12m x 8.3m or say, 14m x 7.14m - you get the picture, I hope.
For ease of planning, I’ll stick with 10m x 10m so if you look at “2” on the rhs of the picture, this gives me the overall shape of layout that I can work with.
Don’t forget that I have to also fit into this area another two rooms/workshops!
Therefore, I can only reasonably take say, a two metre strip along each wall but this still gives me a very substantial area for a layout! In imperial measurements, that’s over 32’ x 32’ and the legs of each ‘L’ being over six and a half feet deep!
Now, going back to my various interests, I have searched the internet and my soul to find a way of running British or American stock on a Germanic scenery layout, for example.
I can’t do it!
My only answer is to build separate decks for each interest and because I want to store trains separately off stage, I can only think of having a large helix to connect the various levels to the storage roads.
This way allows me to run British trains through British scenery and so forth. I was trying to assemble a collection of British H0 stuff together and over the last two decades, have a fair bit but it’s nothing like enough to show a segment of the East Coast main line for example. This forces me to look at 00 once again.
I only mention this because an added problem if I was trying to run a British mainline steam express through a German station (or vice versa) would be fouling of platforms! Similarly, American double stack container trains wouldn’t pass under even European bridges, let alone British ones.
Okay, gotta go now,
John E.
