Like all things "helixy", it consumes the train forever

I prefer the nolix - that's where the layout itself is the helix - and it's all visible track.

I quickly learned in the hobby that I HATE hidden trackage. Sending a train into the nethers of a helix as this guy proposes, while clever, will make the train disappear for practically forever.

This will make well over 50% of the trackage on your layout into hidden trackage. To see how much fun running in hidden trackage is, try running trains on your layout's visible trackage with your eyes closed for over 50% of the time - and you'll see how much fun it is!

Putting a helix or long hidden trackage tunnel in the middle of your mainline run is like hitting a major speedbump when driving. It disrupts the smooth flow of the run significantly. If you must use a helix, it should be at the end of a run - like a helix into/out of staging. Or second best, is a helix as the lead off to a branchline like I've done on my own Siskiyou Line. And by all means, the fewer tiers the better!

Even in my case, my helix is only two tiers - and there's a shadow box scene between the two tiers so the train doesn't disappear for long before it pops into view again.

Any time I see massive multi-tier helix photos, I shudder. My first thought is "oh what fun - another train black hole ..."

Helix/background

I think that the idea is great. That's what you call using your space wisely. It would be nice to see a plan of his layout and how he incoroporated into the two levels.

Visibility

When using a major helix (more than a turn or possibly two), it is imperative (IMHO) that the helix tracks be visible (at least somewhat) so crews can keep an eye on their trains. A crew with an out of sight train for more than 15 seconds will start getting really antsy waiting for it to reappear. An antsy crew will keep nudging up the throttle - partly impatience and partly fear that the train has stalled. The result? Whoosh, warp drive coming back onto the layout (especially going down grade).

I would strive mightily to keep a helix out of the 'main' part of the layout. Joe F has a two turn helix where the branchline splits off of the main and this is sort of tolerable (but mostly because you can see your trains on it). More than that and a helix is either downright annoying or painful. My design calls for a two turn helix to get into and out of main staging. I can't say how this will work in practice since the peninsula is not built yet but I expect it to be an issue - perhaps enough of an issue to assign a crewman to 'staging manager' duty - they'd be responsible for getting outbound trains to the top of the helix and handing them off to a waiting 'road' crew and for accepting inbound trains from a 'road' crew and driving it down the helix to staging. I don't expect that this position would be the most popular position on the railroad. And the helix will be (peek under the layout) visible.

If 50% of your mainline is in a helix you should probably try really hard to get around that issue. More than a couple of turns is not a pleasant thing.

In my opinion, anyway.

Charlie

I like to watch trains

Because I like to watch trains I really have to agree with Charlie and Joe.  The helix featured is going to swallow the fellows trains for a long, long time.

My thoughts on the helix are like Joes.  In/out of staging or on a branchline and as minimal as possible.  The nolix idea and multi levels are both things I want to try on a future layout.

Charlie,

I'm glad you said it...as you were describing the job of running trains through the helix I was thinking...."Oh yay"! :o)

Trade-offs

I just turned 60 and am just starting construction of my layout, after more than 40 years of being without one.  I've watched all of Joe's videos several times, and have operated on a number of local layouts.  Some things Joe has said I've taken to heart - model what you love that got you into the hobby being the one that resonates most.

I took a lot of time to decide what I love, and after much consideration I realized that virtually everything I want to model (actual and imagined) lies within the boundaries of Contra Costa County in California.  Operating on other peoples' layouts has also helped me discover what I hate, and that's anyplace I have to stoop down or crawl on the floor to get to!  We relocated from California to Georgia nearly 9 years ago, and I've been getting my basement ready for the past year and a half.  It sounds like a long time, but includes removing bearing walls, cutting openings in concrete walls (for both people and trains), and relocating lights, a/c ducts, and plumbing drains and vents from one side of a wall to the other.  The basement room I finally have, after swapping rooms with my wife's books, is nearly 1,000 feet square, but has the impediment of being traversed by 8 doorways, including the new one in the concrete wall, and has a stairwell right in the middle of everything.  This means I need to have the track climb pretty high to get the altitude needed to be able to "nod under" in several places.  My design starts with track at 51" along the back wall, and it must climb at a reasonable grade the entire way, because I'm modeling the California coast, which is pretty flat!  Having any grade at all is fudging, really.  So the track climbs at a steady grade under the stair along the wall, and winds around an L-shaped peninsula until it comes to the stairway wall, which it crosses through at 60".  This is the point where the prototype actually enters a tunnel, so mine will enter a tunnel under the stairs.   Just as it exits the other stairway wall, it enters a 3-tier oval helix with curves of at least 42".  I plan to show the tunnel exit just after completing the first tier of the helix, which will have a shadowbox scene of the place where my great grandfather was the section foreman, and the track will curve out of sight just after the passing siding starts on the second tier.  The passing siding will end when the track comes back in sight at the start of the third tier, but not directly over the tunnel exit scene.  The third tier will exit at another tunnel - again prototypical - just before it crosses a valley on a long steel testle.  My nod-under will be under this trestle, where the track will clear the floor by over 6 feet.  If I go under the trestle, I'll step up to a raised operating floor.  If I follow along the track, I'll walk under another section of track before stepping up on another raised operating floor.  Both of these raised operating floors will have step-downs at the other end, and will have walk-unders below the track.  Also, the track (a branch line extending from the area of the first raised operating floor) will cross that stairway above two doorways (I built the doors a little short - 6' 5" rather than 6' 8") so the track will be above eye level and provide a dramatic entrance at the bottom of the stairs where the entrance to the room is.  The branch will wind around the room that has the first part of the mainline, and will be a mushroom above it, and along the walls.  It will finally exit this room above the last doorway (I've built a false wall above a pocket door, for trains) and continue along the wall until it finally exits the room through one of the 3 places I've pierced the concrete wall for trains.  This will be a pretty full location, since it'll have the standard gauge main, the standard gauge branch, and a narrow gauge branch all going through the same hole into 3 different staging loops at first - I haven't convinced my wife that it makes sense to turn the crawl space (which I can now walk into) into another basement room with a bathroom, crew lounge, work shop, and double-ended staging yard...

So I understand the disadvantages of a helix, which for me include lots of raised floors!  But that's just lumber and carpentry, which I can do, and eliminates ducking and crawling under, which I can't do.  Having several scenes visible within the helix will (I hope) reduce some of the "lost train" feeling of hidden trackage, which I agree detracts from the fun of operating trains.  Most of the layouts I've operated on have hidden trackage, and the owners use CCTV systems to allow operators to follow their trains, but watching a train on TV is different - and not as much fun - from walking along with it.  My staging will at first just be loops at either end of the run, but eventually I plan for operators to pick up their trains at the staging yard, adding power and caboose, doing an air check, and starting their run.  At the end, they'll put their motive power away before siging off.

And I"ve got some more ideas for having a double-sided helix going down to staging, where a north-bound engineer's train will appear in a couple of scenes around one side of the helix, and a south-bound engineer will take a different path and his train will appear in a couple of scenes on the other side of the helix.  The tracks will eventually arrive at the same staging yard, but some of the tracks will represent one place, and other tracks will represent another place.  Believe it or not, the idea came from the LDSIG Journal issue which talked about "verticality" as a way to get more operation into a track plan...

So this post is mostly about how excited I am about starting benchwork, and the anticipation of running trains.  While my plans are ambitious, I will be able to at least run trains within a few days of finishing the first section of the lower level benchwork, even if I never complete anything else!

    Paul

Interesting idea...

Everybody thinks their way of doing things is the best way. That's good, because if you don't think the way you are doing things is "best", you have to ask yourself why you aren't doing things the best way. I can see that there is large anti-helix, anti-hidden track contingent in the hobby, and those people will not look favourably on layouts with a lot of hidden trackage. No matter what the advantages may be, the fact that a train is out of sight for a certain length of time will trump any gains made by extending the run or adding scenes or towns. I can respect that. However, I'm part of the club that is embracing the helix and multi-level construction beyond anything I've seen done anywhere else. We only have a portion of the layout done, but the parts that are running utilize 3 multi-purpose helices, and there will be many more before we are finished. No one in the club is complaining that our trains spend too much time in hidden trackage, but then I suppose if they didn't like the hidden trackage, they wouldn't have joined in the first place. If we had stuck with a conventional design, we would have about 400 feet of mainline on one deck. As it stands, we will have over 1200 feet of mainline on 6 decks, plus about 800 feet of branchline and spur trackage. The mainline will be 20 scale miles long, with about 40 different scenes or operational points modelled. There's one optional duckunder to get from one side of the main yard to the other quickly and one lift section to get into the layout from the front room. All other transitions are using stairs, allowing operators to get all the way up to the second floor, following their trains easily the whole way. About the only negative comment I have about the gentleman's layout in the picture is that a one percent grade will leave the train hidden longer than necessary; 1.5% would speed things up without compromising operation, and with so much tangent, you could go up to 2%, no problem. We run 40 car HO scale freights up 1.6% helices at 30" radius reliably. And I hope he leaves some way of getting behind the helix in case something goes wrong; because you never know...

Helix consuming trains?

Joe --

The solution to trains being consumed in a helix was described by Brian Pate in last year's MRP.  Brian put optical detectors in several locations with corresponding LEDs in a track diagram on the fascia.  Those LEDs were given station names, and the stations were included on the timetable.

Scheduled trains could not leave these stations until the designated time, and all trains gave the operator a sense of the train speed by the flickering of the LEDs as the gaps between cars passed the optical detectors.

Brian's simple and elegant solution to the "helix consumption" problem needs to become more widely known.

Don M.

Actually, our club is using

Almost as good as being there...

Using CCTV or detectors and LED's for feedback to a panel are both good ways of tracking a trains progress through hidden trackage but neither is a substitute for actually being able to view the trains.

Visitors, especially youngsters will ooh and ahh while watching trains run.  Somehow the LED's on a panel and a less than ideal image on a screen pale in comparison.  Panel indicators etc. just don't have the same visual impact as the real thing.

Regardless of what technology is being used to track a train on hidden track, it's still gone to the observer.

Sure it's great to go multi-level and sometimes a helix is a necessary component but if a train disappears into the "void" for 5 real-time minutes.  That's too much for me.

Of course this is just my two cents.  Individual results may will vary. :o)

Advisement

Good points on all sides. I understand fully that not being able to see the trains is kind of silly; but from an operational standpoint, I don't see how I (for example) can avoid having at least some on the layout. I'll take all of this into advisement.

Having some

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying that our trains should NEVER disappear!  There is nothing wrong with a train running into a tunnel or disappearing behind a cut, hill or a stand of trees.

In a perfect world we would all have a layout space that would allow us to run around the walls with a nolix to manage the transitions between the multiple decks we desire.  Of course that perfect world does not exist for most of us.

Joe and Charlie, while not big fans of the helix both have situations where they need to use a helix to make the transition between levels possible.  Sometimes there is no way around using a helix and having some hidden track.  I think the important thing is to try to minimize the time that our trains spend in the "black hole" and to find ways to break up the invisible runs.  Joe's shadowbox idea is one that I think could work.

Just a couple more pennies... :o)

Trains going out of sight

If you think about, all trains in the real world disappear out of sight unless the viewer is following in a helicopter.  Even to a stationary viewer on the ground, there are lots of view blocks.  Consider tunnels, for instance -- some are miles long, where the real trains disappear for a longer time than in any model helix.

In their own way, helixes with hidden trackage are just modeling another aspect of the prototype.  < g>

Don M.

Depends how you look at it

what does he do for insulation?

 Looked like the rafters were uninsulated. That would never work in Virginia.

Done it before and will do it again

I had a nolix in 1967.  I found it useful to hide the track as it closely approached the bottom of the second deck.  That was about 10 feet of hidden track with about a 3 to 4-inch elevation there so I needn't look up into the upper deck's framework.  (The upper deck covered about half of the lower deck.)  I'll have a very similar situation for my currently-planned layout.  The advantages of the nolix is that there is much less hidden track and there is no need for a huge blob to contain helix trackage.  With a bed-room sized layout and 30-inch-radius curves, a helix dominates the space.

Not the average layout...

Obviously your layout is not the average fellows layout in a basement or attic which is where this discussion started... 80 feet of track could easily be a third of the track on many layouts.

On very large layouts the helix would obviously not be as much of an issue.

Layout is the helix

I really can't do anything but a helix on my layout because the way my prototype is laid out. Besides having the track climb the needed height would prevent me from incorporating falt areas large enough to hold the the 3 train yards found between Bay Ridge and the Hell Gate Bridge. So I am going to experiment with a concept which I think might work because instead of hiding the helix it will be out in the open.

I need to model the Hell Gate Brigde that runs from Queens to the Bronx in New York City. The prototype bridge has four tracks on it along with catenary for use by electric locomotives. I don't intend to model the catenary and get away with the fiction that all of that catenary has been replaced by third rail power. I figured the best way to get this in would be the make the bridge itself the helix. To do this I am going to model the bridge as having only two tracks rather than having the prototypical 4 tracks. This will make the bridge narrower but still maintain the illusion that thelix isn't a helix at all. All this has to fit in an area that is 40 inches wide and at least that length. No I don't have a drawing of it but the track has to climb and 15 to 16 inches.

Another thing I might do is use the helix to represent all of the bridges (there are 5 including the Hell Gate) that allow this line to climb from ground level in Queens to the much high ground level in the Bronx.

Irv

to helix or not to helix

One of the layouts I operate on has a helix. It's a double track arrangement about 5' in diameter (up-bound on the outer track, down-bound on the inner). Deck separation is on the order of 16 or 18".  I believe there are 10 loops. That means over 300' of track to traverse to get from bottom to top. The trains are out of sight for a long time. You go get a coffee/soda, grab a doughnut, or take a bio-break.

The helix is a necessary evil in this case. The top deck adds another 2/3 of the bottom deck's run length to the total for the RR. Without it, the layout would have to be much smaller in scope and operations would be severely curtailed. For his basment structure, planned operation scheme, and available know-how at the time the helix was the only solution. I suppose that a mushroom arrangement could achieve the same results now, but I doubt he would ever tear out the layout and build a new version.

If I have to employ a helix in my future basement space, I will try to add a couple of herniations to the coils in order to create a few small vignettes for the trains to pass through as they rise up to the next level.

Spiral oval or figure 8

I'm playing with designs for a 10½ foot by 12½ foot bedroom, and have been following the helix discussion in particular, to see if I can a get a decent multi-something to increase mainline and town-to-town distances.  Has anyone done a variation of the helix where a whole peninsula is used as a sort-of elongated helix, or even a layered figure-eight?  As I've thought about this I keep coming with plans that just cris-cross scenes (the old throw lots of track in the plan method).  Any ideas?

Visibility

Don,

It's certainly true that real trains disappear into tunnels. But the difference is the crews of those trains are in the tunnels with their trains so they don't get antsy about whether the train is still moving when they lose sight of it.

Cheers,

Charlie

Visibility

Charlie --

OK, you've convinced me to model subways, where everything is out of sight to everyone except the driver. < g>

Don

It would be a tight fit

Honestly, I'm not sure AC-12's and a peninsula can coexist in that size of space and still leave a decent amount of aisle space. You would have to go down to 28" radius on the end of the peninsula and be down to less than two foot aisles and slivers of benchwork around the walls. Cab-forwards like big curves. If you can work with that, and if you have an idea of being able to run around the walls of the room and either use removable or swinging sections to get past the doorway, you may be able to put the helix in one corner and make the peninsula be an extension of one of the middle turns of the helix; make it a modelled portion of the big hill hidden in the helix. The top and bottom decks can be relatively level then. Where you are going to put your upper level staging is another question entirely, though.

AC's are a tight fit.

Jurgen,

Thanks for your response.   Yes, AC's require space.  If there's room for it, my proto-freelanced design will include a little bit of SP on the coast line, basically around the edges of the plan, with a drop down at the doorway.  (I liked the drop down posted with the photos last week).

My scheme on paper so far is a "C" shape in the room instead of around the wall.  The bottom leg of the "C" is pulled away from the wall so I have access to the back side, thus giving me a peninsula.  Almost all yard area/staging will be in the closet at the edge of the room outside the 10 x 12 area.  The main design itself is based on 2-8-0 and 4-axle diesel power, and 40 ft. freight cars, main line minimum radius is 21 inches.  Reading thrugh the helix discussion caused me to start thinking about the possibility of a second level on part of the layout, for more run length and distance between stops, but an ordinary circular helix would, I think, dominate too much of the room.  That's when I started considering stretching it out along the peninsula or the back of the "C".  Oh, and upper level staging would be above lower level staging in the closet.  Maybe with some sort of vertical transfer table.

I haven't come up with anything I like so far.  Just cris-crossing track at different levels.  I need to work with your last suggestion a bit.  Thanks.