I have been working on this layout in my mind for many many years but the purchase of our current house 5 years ago has transitioned this from dream to project. It took a couple of years to get the room in the basement that was designated the train room(by my daughters when we looked at the house the first time, even before I saw the room) ready for a layout. I had a bunch of modules that I would put together in my old house to run trains but it was a rare time that could occur. In this new house I set up all my modules and cobbled together a few needed connectors and had a decent sized modular layout. But it was disjointed and didn't really do anything but run in a continuous loop. After a couple years I cleaned everything out and added electrical and drywall. Now that I had a specific space I could actually start really planning my layout. I worked and worked and eventually came up with a multi decked truly large layout that scratched all the itches I thought I had. Complicated? yes. Large in scope and detail? yup. Cover all of my truly necessary design elements? yup. I put in a floor and started building. I have Completed the deck for staging, the upper deck and have pieces of the middle deck structure built. I got trains first running on the staging level and had a number of long loops finished and running . I decided that the helix, which is going to be an extremely complicated 3 track affair, would be put off for a while until I had a very good idea of exactly how it was going to work. I also had to allow for when I could devote a significant amount of time to its exact planning and construction. For what I had in mind it could not be something I whipped up. It would have to be engineered well, the parts would have to be constructed well, and assembly would have to be near flawless. So return loop to staging to have continuous run capability and trains are moving again in my house. Covid hits and suddenly we are at home a lot. Just like most people. The structure and backdrop of the top deck get put up. Track is put down, taken up, put down again, and redone as the temporary loop shows me where some issues are. At this moment I have just completed a four track temporary staging yard on the shoo fly and am about to start running a local and switching some of the industries. We are about to see if what I have built is truly capable of supporting operations. But the funny thing is as I have been sitting here writing this I have started wondering if I have really bitten off more than I can chew. I do have local friends that would come over and run the layout when it is complete, or closer, anyway. I am not going anywhere house or job wise in the foreseeable future. Both mine and my wife's jobs are good and stable. Now my kids are headed to college, 1 this year and the other in two years so money for hobbies is definitely going to take take a hit for the next 6 years. We will be left with a house larger than we need, but from when we purchased it and mortgage rates, we couldn't get to a smaller place with room for hobbies for what it would cost. Besides, I still have to tile the kitchen(LOL). So like I said, sitting here writing this has made me wonder if I should just make a nolix or one or two turn helix down and just abandon the second deck as a sceniced level and just make staging on it and have just the upper deck as the visible portion of the railroad. Cuts complexity by a huge amount due to the way simpler helix(or whatever) down one level. Cuts cost by obvious amounts. Now operating wise it would be 4-5 people instead of 7-10. Now for either I could come up with the crews so that is not so much an issue. But it is way easier to put 5 folks together than 10. So you would definitely be operating more often with the smaller layout. Lastly, I am fully planning to have signaling and fairly complex electronics on the layout. That becomes much more doable when you halve the size of the layout as well. Lots of questions are still unanswered but are being worked on. I have enough motive power to run this top deck once put decoders in the locos I own and have the preorders I have come it. If Scale Trains brings their SD45 and GP30 down to n scale I would definitely have a good representation and enough motive power to do what I needed to do. I have 5 trains made up on the layout currently and still have plenty of cars in storage to be able to populate even the larger version without too much trouble. But right now it is just poking at me that I could simplify right now and probably be happy with what I have. I really guess that I will have to get a little further down the road of running this upper deck to make that call.
Here is the thread over at the Railwire that pretty much lays out the construction. I believe this is legal to link out for this forum? If not please let me know. It's seven pages so rehashing it here would be tough to do.
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/in...?topic=49856.0
Thanks for reading. I will get some pics up in here soon.
Ryan
Here is the thread over at the Railwire that pretty much lays out the construction. I believe this is legal to link out for this forum? If not please let me know. It's seven pages so rehashing it here would be tough to do.
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/in...?topic=49856.0
Thanks for reading. I will get some pics up in here soon.
Ryan
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