My sympathies

As the unwilling host to two felines, I concur that they are < unprintable> pains in the posterior.  Never mind the damage they can do to a layout (limited at the moment to a Free-Mo module in buildup), you can't leave anything on a work surface.  DCC decoder left on the bench?  Nope, now it's a cat toy.  No telling where the NMRA 8-pin I wanted to solder on it went to.

Jerks.

The two dogs?  Aside from undercoat and dust, no problems.

Good luck with the rebuild, and here's hoping you don't discover any biological damage.

Wow.

I think I must have the most well behaved cats in the world. I have three cats, and none of them go near the layout (okay, one once licked the rails before there was a layout, while they were powered with DCC, and is a bit scared of the layout) About the only thing they will do, is when a train goes behind the headboard of the bed, they will watch with curiosity.

Well, Arthur (my little black cat... little... he's ten pounds of pure muscle) would play with my roommates kid when he played with his Bachmann Thomas set I got him for his birthday... but that was just a big oval of track in the living room floor (he would watch from under the coffee table, and when the kid wasn't paying attention, he'd bat a rear car off the tracks)

But yeah... rail fanning from a distance is the worst my cats do.

no, Warflight... that'll be mine.

Not all are bad. Well, maybe...

These two are the dregs of cat society, as far as I'm concerned.  Orange tabby whose life apparently is to kill anything it sees, just for sport, and to howl at the door as soon as the last light fades from the skies.  The other antisocial little beast thinks we're here to feed it, period and end of statement.  Any other interaction is verboten.

I miss the third.  Serena by name. Black tuxedo, personality to burn, lap sitter and keyboard buffer, playful, giver of live birds at 5am because I'm supposedly a lousy hunter (note to self: close and lock the dog door before bed).  She'd have been the curious observer on the edge of the bench, or in the lap while I worked.  Went missing for several weeks, turned up at a neighbor who'd lost her husband around the same time.  Cat with a mission.  I let her be.

No photos of the cat sleeping

No photos of the cat sleeping on the layout? 

My cat (Bubbles...aka Bubba) has never jumped onto my layout. She will sometimes jump onto a stool to watch the trains run. Worst thing she does is leave "land mines" on the floor. Yes, i do share the room with the litter box. 

Dogs can be............

............a problem too.  Milo, my English springer spaniel used to hang out with me in the basement all day watching me work. He had a bed under the workbench and in the layout room. All was well until I started to add sound. He went nuts barking at the sound coming from any steam or diesel locomotives just like the vacuum cleaner or the hair dryer. Once they started moving he would jump up at them and once nearly knocked an $1800 brass steamer to the floor!!  Whenever I ran them or worked on them he was sent upstairs to visit mom in her home office. In his later years he became hard of hearing and stopped barking at any sound. Problem solved. 

Peter

It amazes me how people will

It amazes me how people will let animals tear things up.

We always had dogs growing up, and I've had cats as an adult (until they started causing breathing problems - turns out I'm mildly allergic). They were not allowed in certain areas of the house, including the train room. So no problem with a pet-damaged layout.

I guess the concept of closing doors to keep a pet out of areas where they might cause damage just doesn't occur to everyone... 

Surviving Cats and Dogs

My first house shared layout space with several cats and a couple of dogs,  and the house was heated with a wood burning stove.  Well I could not just close the door to the bedroom that the layout was in because heat would not circulate into the layout room.  So I got and old screen door and replaced the bedroom door with a screen door.  The dogs would not bark because they could see me and the cats would ignore the screen door as there was nothing to see as far as they where concerned.  When we moved the regular was put back on and I don't remember what happened to the screen door.

Now I have a cat that doesn't play with any of my train stuff and I have small parts, wire, cars of every description and just about every item that a modeler would need. I don't know why but I will not trade her for anything.

Dan

@mark,. I'm sure you know they can be a

Child gates

I've got those child gates on three doors in the house - the library/computer room (cat likes to pee on certain electronics sitting on the floor), the "3rd Bedroom" which I use as a photo studio (seems there is still some remaining scent of the previous cat... and Ashford wants it gone), and the Garage/layout room. He can't jump up to the layout anymore (or doesn't think he can), but he used to be able to, and I really don't want to find any evidence of his being there back in a dark corner....

We choose to be victims.......or not

You have far more patience than I do and I admire you.  If I had a situation like you did and couldn't keep the cats from invading my home I would have done the following:  1.) Purchased an electric fence charger (the highest voltage that I could find); 2.) Erect a "fence" of wires around the perimeter of the layout high enough to keep jumping cats from defeating it; and 3.) Turned on the fence charger!

Cats are smart, so once they contacted the electric fence ONCE they wouldn't go near it again.  BTW, this same method works for small children and unwanted adults!

“Cat”apult?

The word catapult can’t be a coincidence.  They guy who invented it probably had to share his workspace with a few felines and needed something to test it with...

Keeping the basement door closed always worked for me.  Well almost always - one day came home, we couldn’t find one of the cats anywhere.  Eventually looked in the basement, even though we couldn’t imagine how he would have gotten there.  And there he was, trotting across the hung ceiling on the train room side of the basement to poke his head out into the shop side of the basement, covered in spider webs and dust, grinning ear to ear - he was clearly enjoying his adventure!  Turns out he had discovered he could pull out the bottom corner of the hatch in a closet covering the bathtub plumbing access, gotten into the space and managed to squeeze down through the hole around the drain pipe into the basement ceiling.  Resourceful little guy.

Careful with that,

We left a furnace floor cold air return register off one summer, and I had to rescue a cat from the inside of the furnace.  Sheesh.  Glad we didn't have AC!

We've had up to three cats at a time in the past, but The smells associated with a litter box area will dissipate... in a century or so.  We had one cat that, for whatever reason, decided that the floor beside the box was the target.  Didn't matter what we did.  Grrr.  In a new house now, and cats will be welcome the day I move out, not before.

Thankfully my wife now considers dogs to be far more rewarding pets.  It's so much nicer owning, rather than being owned.

Blair

Reasonable Accomodation

I have a nice little modeler's workbench set up in the train room. One of my cats, loves to follow me from room to room to keep me company. I bought an extra rolling "guest" chair, covered it in a soft blanket. Now the cat has a place to keep me company and no longer feels the need to be up on the workbench.

Smart cats

 I have a shelf layout which is above the doors and windows  extending from the back porch through the kitchen then around 3/4 of  the living room and turning around in the hall and second level back to the porch again.  No wife when I started it and too old to dig out a space under the house from the root cellar size basement besides we have a high water table in the ground. 

  We have a Russian Blue, her color changes from silver to dark gray depending on how the light strikes her. Right after we got her about 4 years ago  I found her on the layout and yelled "get down" .  She did a 7 foot leap to the floor and never has been caught up there again. Irina (also Russian) has a folding table she puts her crocheting stuff on. Bell will lay on it while she is crocheting sitting on the couch, but when I come into the room unless Irina put her hand on Bell to stop her she is down and gone. 

The stray cat Irina took in because it was below zero nights last winter has not been up there either.  Irina caught her on the kitchen sink and made her stop jumping up there. A chewing out  in Russian or Ukrainian and a few hours back outside below zero helped train her. No the wife wouldn't translate what she said.

Conundrum

My conundrum with cats is a trade-off issue.  My railroad is in a room with the boiler and has a door and my adjacent modelling room also has a door (both off of the basement family room).  We have three cats, two of which are still kittens and who get into everything, go on everything , climb the Christmas tree, etc.  If allowed access to those rooms, they not only would be likely to do significant damage, but I would be concerned for the health of the kittens given their propensity to try chewing on or eating anything they find.

So my solution has been to always keep the two doors closed.  The kittens will hang out in our adjacent basement family room whenever I am working on my railroad, and they gain a little attention from me when I go from room to room and see them there.  But the trade-off is that there is very little circulation in either of those rooms.  They do have air vents for the heating system, so they get some circulation, but it makes me wonder about the air quality when I spend a lot of time there.

I am somewhat tempted to find cheap latchable screen doors or something to use on those rooms in the basement, but I don't know what reaction I would get from the household permitting department head. Of course, if I were to go to that extreme, they would best be really inespensive, because no doubt the kittens would be climbing the screens.

-Ed

I have 3 dogs and 1 cat. So

I have 3 dogs and 1 cat. So far.....knock on wood....none of them has shown much interest in the trains. I did come home one day to find a couple of trees I had been working on laying in the middle of the living room floor, but to date that is the only trouble.

Get a watch dog ????

That’s why you should get a dog.  No dog is gonna mess with his owners layout.   And if there’s a cat around your dog will handle the situation????????????????

@ed.. kittens that are unruly should come with

Water sprayer

Our kittens have learned extremely well ... to watch for us to reach for the spray bottle and jump down or run off with whatever they grabbed.  We started from an early age (about 3 months which was within 2 weeks after we got them.)  It worked with past cats for us, but these two kittens - and really one of the two in particular - is willing to get literally soaked and the only lesson has been to watch and listen more carefully while up to no good.

We keep trying, though.

-Ed