Our family has begun a new project - a small layout in a wider hallway in our recently finished basement. Yep, it's not much space, but it's enough for us to tackle as a first effort.
I had a 4x8 in my Grandma's basement when I was 7, a brief attempt at something a little bigger when I was 14, but I've always kept the hope that "one day" I'd be able to try something again. I've been a subscriber to MRH for almost 8 years and have loved to learn, but it's time to get out of the armchair. Now, we finally have a little bit of space and our kids are at the perfect age to get them involved, so here goes!
The total space in the hallway is 12'8" x 8', but even if I could fit an oval in there somehow, a duckunder or liftout would not be practical since the hallway needs to be accessible. So that leaves us with an L-shaped point-to-point. That fact alone has already stretched the rest of the family's understanding of what a model railroad "ought" to be, since they think in terms of watching trains go round and round for no real purpose. But they're slowly catching on...
The layout also needs to be portable to some degree since we'd like to take it with us if/when we move. It's built into four sections made out of 3/4" plywood cut into 1x3s and topped with 1/2" plywood. Only the largest section is free-standing, while the rest bolt onto each other in turn. I'm planning to describe the benchwork in a little more detail in a future post.
As for the theme, it's roughly based on an interesting scene we see often in our hometown of Woodstock, ON. We love to hike the trails along the Thames River and frequently see/hear the CP or Ontario Southland Railway trains that rumble past. So to help us focus our skills and to give us inspiration, we decided to model this area but tweak it a bit to suit our interests and our available space.
I used the demo version of 3rd PlanIt to draw up a simple plan and printed it out, as you can see below (never mind my pencil marks). It's in HO scale, modern era, and the minimum radius is 26". The lower left corner has the double tracks that head east around Pittock Lake and the right side is our freelanced/condensed version of the small CP yard in Woodstock which then heads west toward London. In the corner, we'll model the bridge over the Thames River below the Pittock Dam, and add in the trails that our family uses often. There's a switchback at the top of the yard for a couple warehouses, below that are two yard tracks, then comes the old CN interchange track that's now used by OSR to head out to Beachville, and then two CP tracks. We'll probably use the bottom track as an industry track, instead, which is why we wanted the crossovers there. There's also an RIP track in the middle.
I know it's not perfect, but I could dream and critique forever in the hopes of getting it just right, but sometimes the best lessons are learned by being willing to make mistakes. Besides, the goal is to keep this as a family project - to work on things together and to grow our skills together.
Here's a photo of the plan:
