GREAT START

You have the right approach but the wrong colors.  Please take a min and watch a couple of mins of the attached video.  Your Blue is way to dark and painting clouds is tough.  I paint on blue paint then while wet start streaking in white paint.  Lighter at bottom and darker at top.  This is just my comments.  But when you get finished and look at scene you will find, that if you leave the blue the way it is, you will be looking at dark sky and not trains.

Sky blue

Actually, the blue sky was one of the few things I liked about the layout.  I wasn't terribly happy with the clouds, but in part that was because I tried to cover up some early failures with more spray paint clouds, and I felt that I ended up with too many clouds in the sky.

But it's all a moot point, anyway.  The sky is gone along with the rest of the layout.  Now I need to clean, patch, and paint the walls in the room.  At least there's no major damage to repair.  I tried to make it as easy to remove cleanly as possible, and now I can say that I more or less succeeded.

I can relate

I can relate. I enjoy building and kitbashing locomotives (my entire loco stable shudders every time I pick up a razor saw) and it seems like I've been building the layout forever.

However, I seem to have reached that point where I can see the end of track laying and I've been occasionally operating my trains on the portion of the layout which is up and wired.

My layout will require three moderate size bridge (think CV Pratt Truss bridge), two truss bridges and one wood trestle. When I'm not laying track downstairs, I work on the 1st truss bridge, which I am kitbashing from a CV Pratt Truss kit. This seems to satisfy my building desires and keeps the unfinished portion of the layout from weighing too heavily on me.

George

Welcome

Ken,

Welcome to the I had a layout once club. Good luck on your future endeavors.

Regards,

John

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Listen, if you start worrying about the people in the stands, before too long you're up in the stands with them.   Tommy Lasorda

Locos

There are several published plans that consist essentially of a loco servicing area-- a roundhouse, diesel house, wash racks, coaling tower, ash pit, sand house, diesel fuel, car repair shop, etc. Operating such a layout, if you're into that, can be quite satisfying -- bring out a loco, service it, send it to the ready track (hidden staging?), service engines coming off the road before sending them to the roundhouse or a storage for the night, etc. etc.   I bring this up because I suspect you'll eventually want a place to display all those fabulous locos you'll now have the time to work on.  Sorry but I can't find the particular plan I'm thinking of right now -- I just spent a fruitless half hour looking at the Model Railroader track plan database without finding what I thought was there.  John Allen's old "Track Planning for Realistic Operation" does have a great section on engine terminals.  I belong to a club that has only one moderate sized engine terminal -- a steam-diesel transition era facility with all of the structures I mentioned above, and it fits nicely in a 26" x 6' space,  though the roundhouse has only 4 tracks.  We aren't ready for  operations yet, but I already know it will be fun to operate there.  Maybe you can throw out a challenge to MRH subscribers to help you design something.   

I agree, Ken, break the mold

Ken:

I agree with seustis ... break the mold as to a layout you might do that fits you.

We modelers somehow think we need to do what everyone else is doing and that we need some yard here, some mainline there, a town over here, a warf there, and a few industries here. Looks just like all the other layouts in the world, with little thought that you might like some things and not be all that fond of others.

For instance, I know one modeler who loves mainline running, so he has no significant yards on his layout other than staging yards. You get a lot more mainline that way - and who says you NEED a yard, anyhow?

I've seen other layouts that are totally yard, or that are totally industrial park switching and nothing else.

With your fondness for locos, I'd think a really nice engine facility and not much else would be just what the doctor ordered. Get outside the box, break the mold. Do what fascinates you and forget all that other stuff.

Razor Saw

the best invention since sliced bread !

Think I'm in a similar situation, when I was allowed to use a room for model railroading I started making plans, plans led to the woodwork going up and underneath one of the wall shelves came the WORKSPACE. Then layout work sort of stopped and I've been fiddling and bashing ever since...

I realy need to clean up the workspace, tuck all non-track laying tools away and start building the railroad ! It is mostly a depot with large locomotive area and a line around the room with 3 scenes.

But then there's the rake of trolley coaches, the DD40AX waiting to be turned into a big On30 diesel, the latest batch of 3 rail buses that won't move etc etc etc

cheers, Leo

Future plans

Thanks for the comments, guys.  There was a little more to the decision, of course.  There were a lot of niggling issues, places where I'd cut a corner or tried to force track where it didn't really want to go, grades that were steeper than I'd have liked, turnouts which needed maintenance or repair, etc. and I just felt overwhelmed by the whole thing.  Also, my wife and I are thinking of building/buying a new home in the next few years, and I realized that I could devote a lot of time and money to building a layout that was destined to be torn down in fairly short order.

For now, I'm free to work on getting my locomotive roster in good shape.  That way, when I do build a layout, I'll have equipment to run on it.  I've been caught in a catch 22, where I couldn't run the layout because I needed to build my locomotives, but I couldn't build my locomotives because I felt that I had to work on the layout.  I more or less needed to finish everything all at once, and that was just too much.  It was strangling my ability to enjoy my hobby, which pretty much defeats the purpose of a hobby.

As for a layout in that space, I've thought about doing as some of you have suggested.  The D&W yard and shop complex would probably fit nicely along the long wall (the main wall in the photos above) of the room, even when modeled fairly close to the prototype.  That would give me plenty of switching and locomotive storage/display, and give me a chance to hone my handlaying skills.  There wasn't a straight turnout in that yard!  However, I'm still on the fence about whether to even bother.  I might be better off spending my tine working on rolling stock.  If the layout bug bites again, at least I have a plan.  For now, I'm thinking WAY outside the box on layouts - none at all, and by choice.

...

The Layout itself is not necessarily the Hobby, though so many push it as so...if your pleasure is locomotives, there's no reason to be building a layout...that space is better used for tooling, workbenches, and dead yards!! 

There's always FreeMo! and clubs

  Hopefully there are some layouts near you if you really NEED to see your locos run ...

who says you NEED a yard, anyhow?

This is my plan as well.   I love mainline running and industrial switching.  I have a diesel servicing area and their will be a yard in this area, but I love having lots of various industries and the different styles of architecture they bring to a layout.

James

loco servicing area track plan

Maybe you're thinking of the plans shown in Marty McGuirk's "The Model Railroader's Guide to Locomotive Servicing Terminals?"

Paul E. Sojka

...

Who says you need a track plan at all?  Flat level horizontal space holds locomotives, parts, and projects up just fine...

Love the fresh start....

Ken, all the best.  If you get the bug to work on a bit of scenery, build yourself a small diorama, as some of the guys have.  You can keep the scenery skills sharp and also create a realistic setting to photograph those locos you will be churning out!

-bill

A wild idea

I've been thinking about potential layout plans.  As I mentioned earlier, I'm thinking of just modeling the Danville & Western's shops in Danville, VA.  That would give me a place to watch the engines go back and forth, and to take pictures.  It would also let me accurately model my favorite railroad, something which the old layout did not.  With that in mind, I sat down with the ICC Valuation maps and XTrackCAD and tried to draw up a plan for my space (13'6" x 48").  Here's the first draft, which includes all the tracks that show on the map:

Obviously, I didn't take the time to draw any structures.  The big problem I have with that plan is that it requires 20" radius curves, #5 turnouts at best, and compresses a number of the structures which were there.  But then I started thinking..  Since the objective would basically be to build a display diorama and photo backdrop, it doesn't have to operate.  The wye really eats up space and had no particularly interesting scenery or structures as far as I know.  Going back to the ICC map, I decided to see what would happen if I just cut a piece out of it the size of my space:

I could probably reduce it to about 3' deep, and I'd cut the corner off where the main line goes across the upper left.  I'm thinking about having the plan printed full size, gluing it down, and laying track directly on top.  It would be a perfect 1/87th scale model of the shop complex, minus the wye.  And, if I'm careful, I might be able to salvage the layout whenever I move and get ready to build my grand layout.

Of course, I haven't even made up my mind whether I want to build another layout, but I do like the idea of a space with lots of track and structures and not much scenery.  I really don't like doing scenery.

Modules

On having a layout

I do have a Fremo module which has been half finished for a while, and I might resume work on it just to see trains going.  I don't really have a desire to build an entire layout out of modules, though - especially in such a small space.

As much as it goes against the common attitude, the truth is that I don't really get a lot of enjoyment out of operating a model railroad, especially alone.  I can, and do, enjoy operating as part of a group, but when I'm alone I'd be happier to sit at my workbench and build models.  That's a part of what drove the decision to tear the layout down - I just don't need a layout to be happy.  Anything I build in the near future will probably be little more than a place to sit and look at models going back and forth.