Yay, Frisco!

Frisco:

It's always great to see people when people get started on their layout projects - the room prep for my Siskiyou Line took me some 3 months. I had to knock out a wall, put in a wall, seal the garage door shut and back it with a semi-permanent wall. Then I had an electrician come in and add a new subpanel for the layout room, and I added wiring to new outlets and a series of 5 switches to turn all the lighting and layout room power on and off.

Once the first stick of benchwork went in, boy was I excited! We bought the house in February of 1991, and while the room prep was underway, I finished the layout planning. Finally, in May of 1991 the actual layout construction started!

As to layout lighting, I've come to the conclusion that installing ordinary light sockets (as in the screw in type) gives you the most flexibility - in my case I use some special small porcelain fixtures every 2 feet along the valance. By using the normal screw sockets, you can use incandescent or the new compact florescent (CFLs) bulbs.

One major advantage of the CFLs is they're available in most any color temperature range (2700K - 6500K) so you can get whatever light temperature appeals to you. You can also get dimmable CFLs, although they're kind of pricey and even at their dimmest setting, they still look rather bright to the naked eye - but at least they're dimmable! The other big plus with CFLs is they run cool and take about 15-25% the wattage per lumen output than tungsten bulbs do.

My favorite place to shop for CFLs is online at 1000bulbs.com. They have more bulb types than you can imagine!

Great to hear a new layout is

Great to hear a new layout is taking shape! It took me 4 months to get my train room ready for installing tracks.

I had to dismantle the old layout, clean up the mess and finally re-arrange most of the benchwork - which I was able to save!

Is there a link yet to the

Is there a link yet to the room ?  If so, it's not obvious to see.

Jeff, No link to my new

Jeff,

No link to my new layout room yet. I haven't even taken any photos yet. I forgot to take before photos but will be taking some in progress photos soon. I do have some photos of the area last year and might be able to use them for a refrence of sorts.

Denny, I'm very excited about

Denny,

I'm very excited about getting started. I hope to have some trains running by Oct. or Nov. Although there is still alot to do yet it doesn't take me very long to do all the carpenter work. I was unable to save any of the benchwork from the previous layout so everthing will be new. This will be my second layout in as many years. The one I built last year was just a test bed layout and I learned alot about what I want and what not to do and materials not to use. Plus the new layout will be quite abit larger.

What did you decide to do for the ceiling?

What did you decide to do for the ceiling?

Chris

Lighting

Two words:

Track Lighting.

They are really simple to put up, and once up you can move them around as much as you want.  My last set was like 6 minature spotlights that I could throw around the room at a moment's notice.

It's a thought.

Benny

Chris, There is a ceiling

Chris,

There is a ceiling already in place. When the house was built they sheet rocked and textured the ceiling in the garage so all I have to do is fill the holes from the garage door and opener and paint it. I will get that painted as soon as I get all of the new sheetrock taped and mudded. I have to do some wiring before I can do that though, hopefully I can get that done Saturday.

Benny, I still haven't

Benny,

I still haven't decided on lighting for the layout yet. However, for the room I'm thinking can lights. For the layout track lighting might work but the ceiling is 9' 2'' high, so I might have to build valances like Joe has on his layout. When the benchwork starts taking shape I will decide what will look the best for the room and the layout.

Nice!

Nice! That room is gonna look great!

Thumbs up for valence lighting.

Even on my (very) small layout the valence does a great framing the layout. That was one experiment that is definitely being done on my next larger layout.

Chris

A Lighting Option

Here are a few photos of what I did for my N-scale Benchwork lighting. The Valence and the benchwork are all made from 5/8 plywood. The lighting diffuser is the kind used in suspended ceilings. I have added braces to the valence so I could store everything up top. The valence is covered on top with 1/8 Hardboard with weatherstripping between it and the plywood to seal in the light. I plan to paint the hardboard white to reflect even more light.

The Lights are cool white fluorescents that are only 9 W each... (40 W equivalent in incandescents).  I wired them together with standard household wiring and used temporary type lighting fixtures. I wired these to a light switch, and the power is routed from the wall via an appliance replacement cord that has had one end cut off and wired into the light switch box.

A view from underneath and two views from above. 

Looking in from the door. 

The work bench is also lighted. 

I hope this helps.

Dustin, that's really nice -

Dustin, that's really nice - but it does look expensive in both time and money.

track lights would not work as well as your system in the longrun, unless you wanted to have museum style lighting - but Tracks far beat out trouble lights and any odd assortment of lights you can imagine even if you just tack the string up temporarily.

Climate Control

Frisco,

Great news about your new trainroom, I'm a garage dweller myself!

I see you've gone alot farther than I did, by eliminating the large doors.  Q: Is there already HVAC ductwork going into your 'ex' garage - or do you live in a region that has been blessed with a steady year-round temperature?  This was something I underestimated before I began putting up my benchwork, as soon as that winter weather set in I knew I had a major problem...!

Cost of Valence

The bulb fixtures were $3.98 ea. The brackets to hold them were just a few dollars for a four-pack.  The plastic lighting diffusers ran about $5.98 for a 2X4' sheet. Also, the white channels to support the plastic were $5.98 for a 12' length.

I figure it cost about $15 a linear foot to build one of these valences (assuming you mount lights every 12" as I did), so cost can be prohibitive. I must say, the one aspect I really like is having storage above the layout (it keeps things off the floor).

The plywood construction goes a long way. It has only taken 3 sheets of 5/8 ply to build everyting in my layout room so far, with lots of leftover.

Dustin, That valance systems

Dustin,

That valance systems looks exceptionally good. I'm still not to sure if valances are the way to go for my layout. I will see later as soon as I get going on the benchwork. The reason being is that my ceilings are so high, 9'2" and then only 9' 1 1/2" after I get the laminate floor installed. I'm thinking can lights right now but could change my mind later. Is that a work bench I see under your layout? My plans are for my layout room to be the complete deal, layout, workbench, paint booth, etc. The etcetra is a train storage drawer, display case, small TV and DVD player. The train storage drawer will be deep enough and long enough to store whole trains. All of these things will be built as cabinets and will roll out from underneath the layout so I can access the layout wiring.

Ken, There isn't any ductwork

Ken,

There isn't any ductwork into the garage yet. I plan on tying into the house ductwork as I only have to run about six feet of ductwork to get to the garage from the nearest AC/Heat vent. Unfortunately, I don't live where it is always a nice steady year-round temp, SE Kansas, hot in summer and cold in winter. When the room is finished no one will ever guess that it was once a garage when they see it.

Wish I could say the same

Wish I could say the same about my garage, I didn't have the patience or the extra funds.  At least I have plenty of blue extruded-foam Dow Board sheets to hide the ugly background when I shoot photos, LOL.

I wound up installing a 12,500btu window-mounted heat pump to solve my heating/AC problem.

Money we don't have alot of

Money we don't have alot of but patience is a virtue, LOL. I figure that I'm going to be spending alot of time in the layout room so it has to be comfortable not just for me but I don't want my trackwork and benchwork doing all kinds of funny things. We also thought about a window unit as well but the new room doesn't have any windows and it is just cheaper and easier to tie into an existing heat and AC ducts. Only bad thing is that I have to get under the house, I don't like doing that at all.

Hmmm... Going back through my

Hmmm...

Going back through my old records, I found this:

On this webpage you will find both the discussion about the installation: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kaurb/5lu20070915.html

A little further down in the page shows the lights in action; previous pictures of the layout show the overall lighting effect without the lights.

 The records show that 2 sets [8 feet] cost about 100 bucks - that's 12.5 dollars a foot where 8 feet holds 6 lights.

But the installation time was roughly half an hour; I realize it is impossible to compare our free time to real work time, as free time is exhorbinantly expensive compared to work time, my work pays me 18 an hour.  So we could consider this to be $12.50 a foot in materials and another $1.11 dollar a foot for installation.  If I wanted to take them down, its a total of 6 screws or maybe 8 scres, and then the clamps holding up the cable - which I replaced with a white one eventually.  So if I wanted to go another route, I could in a heartbeat - and in the meantime, I had lights.  I only hade 30 Incehces between the layout deck and the ceiling, sop there really wasn't any room for a valence! [8 foot tall toom, or so]

Now if I had just bought tracks and connectors instead of the box kit, it might have been a little cheaper.  If I recall right, a connector is about 4.00 and a track alone is between 5 and 10 bucks.

I quickly discovered (to my

I quickly discovered (to my great joy, since I'd decided to take it over anyway) that the single car garage in the house we bought was not suitable for parking cars in (poor concrete job - it was already cracking after only 5 years).

My parents, as my birthday/Christmas present that year insulated and sheetrocked the walls of the room the week after we took posession, and a couple months later my wife and I rented a sheetrock jack and did the same to the ceiling. Goofed in not putting up the insulation as we sheetrocked, requiring holes to be cut in the ceiling later. Ah well.

Since this was an add-on to a manufactured home, there was no HVAC or water heaters in there - it was basically a big rectangle. One otherwise difficult to use corner between two doors got taken up by a chest freezer, and the first 8 feet of one wall was taken over by our gorilla storage racks. Other than that, it was mine!

Lighting was pretty easy - I bought six surface mount fixtures, and ran appliance cord between them with a plug-in to a screw-in outlet to what was originally the back door light. 100w equivalent CFLs gives me a lot of light in that room.

Layout room

My layout room hasn't changed much since it was first designated as such in 1982. The only major change, that hadn't been done to it in 1982 was to instal a dropped ceiling and flourescent lighting fixtures. This change was done in 2004 when we did our last home renovation.

When I had my old layout, it was a constant battle with dust and other dirt and it was the major reason I didn't miss actually running trains until last May. That and having no time or money to indulge in it were the primary reasons the room stayed filled with junk.

Now the room is not only brighter, but also cleaner and will not have the dust coming down from the rafters. The walls were originally sheetrocked and prepped for painting back in 1982. I found I didn't have to prep them again before I started painting them blue. THis photo is of the room as it was last week when I started painting. These walls be the backdrop for my  layout so I still need to paint the clouds on them and what ever other backdrop colors I will need.

I am revising the benchwork plan today so I don't know if I'll get a chance to do anything else.

Working on the train room or layout sure do take a lot of work. But now that I am semi-retired, time doesn't seem to be a problem. Besides even with cable, daytime TV isn't interesting even with the History and Military Channels these days.

Irv

+

I'm also in the layout room preparation phase. Have the walls up and a sub floor installed to keep the concret dust level down.   Installed my  electrics;  outlets and fluorescent lighting. I've put up a  masonite background, mudded and taped.   Want to finish and paint the backdrop before I put in the hung ceiling.

10 X 10'6 is what my plan calls for. All I wanted, to keep the cost down.  Most of the benchwork is assembled and in waiting of a plywood top.  The plan is for single level round the wall with a small staging area thru one wall.

So far so good.

Marc

Dustin,   your is a promising

Dustin,

your is a promising layout. Do you have any other pics or perhaps a construction blog?