Tristan, I like your idea

I like the concept

I agree with Rick, you need to make sure it is level. However, my biggest concern is access to all the stuff that need to be "underground"? Wiring, any turnout controls, and room to work. Maybe it would be possible to have a "shelf" that has a removable side panel and at least part of the bottom panel able to open somehow. 

An intriguing idea but access to the "workings" is the major issue I see.

I think it's a great idea!

I think it's a great idea!  As you can see in the photos, the shelf is more like a 'pocket'.  You could finish the top, front and sides, and make the bottom removable to gain access to interior wiring, switches, etc.  Give it some thought.

"Floating Shelves"

 I don't like the physics of the concept, the leverage is quite poor. The common cheap pressed metal shelf brackets take up little space and are quite strong. If you screw one to studs every 32 or 48 inches your shelf will be much less likely to tilt down in front....DaveBranum

Should work fine

I think these floating shelves will work out just fine. Put all your wiring on the top and hide it behind scenery. Use manually switch throws like those from caboose hobbies. An advantage that I could see is that you can keep the shelves removable, that way you can take it down and work on it at the workbench, plus when it comes time to move it to the basement it will be easy to relocate.

Model Trains don't weight that much so you don't need to go overboard on supports, A lot of people go overboard and make benchwork that you can jump up and down on, that really is not necessary. You will have to work out some method of keeping the different sections aligned, suitcase clasps come to mind attached to the sides or bottom with maybe some alignment dowels in the middle.

Brent

Make sure your walls are straight, ture, & verticle.

Also make sure your corners are 90 degrees.  If your house is new construction and was not built by a really high end custom builder, speed of construction takes precedence over getting everything just right.  When my house was remodeled, my contractor took the time to make sure that every floor joist was installed with the crown up.  He then took the time to run his planer over the joists and remove the crown, and made sure that everything was dead on straight and level before he glued and nailed the sub floor to the joists.  He took the same sort of care when he built the new walls to make sure that they were exactly dead on vertical.  Most builders won't do that much checking and adjusting to get thing right on.  Also when drywall is installed, the thickness of the mud and any texture may change it slightly, so you may need to adjust for these little differences from straight, plum, and true.  Close enough is fine for most construction, but you need it dead on for a model railroad.

You will need to be careful to make all of the supports straight, true & plumb.  Because most lumber has some sort of warp or twist to it, I think steel studs for the shelf support with a 2x4 used only for the furring strip that the shelf supports would be bolted to would be the way to go.

I would use 1/2 inch marine grade or furniture grade plywood for the top sides and front of the shelves.  Then use luan door skin material for the bottom.  Make the shelves 1 inch thicker, inside measurement, than the steel runners with blocks to shim underneath the steel runners to make everything tight.  In fact, if you use 2x4 blocks laid sideways and make the shelf 1 1/2 inch thicker than the runners inside measurement, then you can cut out access panels in the bottom and screw the panels to the blocks.  Don't make the blocks full length.  Use two shorter blocks for each runner to allow an opening between the blocks to provide a channel to run your wiring.  With 1/2 inch plywood tops, you could then mount terminal strips to the underside of the floating shelves between each pair of runners.  Solder a drop wire to every single piece of rail, and screw them to the terminal strips.  Then from your main bus wires solder a jumper wire to connect each buss wire to the correct terminal to power the terminal strips.  Finally either use Peco turnouts or make your own Peco style springs for the turnouts or use Caboose industries ground throws or similar to throw turnouts.  You won't really have room to install under table switch machines inside the shelving plus it will be a real hassle to install and align them inside the confines of the shelf.

Thanks Everyone. I did notice

Thanks Everyone. I did notice the top shelf was starting to sag in the photo. I found the photo in a Google image search and didn't really look at it all that closely except for the design concept. My thoughts were to maybe add some metal L-Brackets to the joints to increase the structural stability of the unit. I have found some metal mounting brackets that are basically a 3/4" tube welded to a 1x2 plate that is mounted to a wall and anchored to the studs. My only thoughts on that were that all the force would be concentrated on the small plates. While they might not pull out, the bottoms may have a tendency to push in creating an indent in the drywall, and also give that sagging look. I'm still trying to figure out access for wiring. I was thinking about just making the bottom so it could be removed for access. I planned on using ground throws for the turnouts. I have a more to look into but I thought I'd run the concept by everyone to see what you guys thought. I've seen these shelve can hold some pretty substantial loads in some pictures that have turned up during my research.

Don't bolt any bracket directly to drywall even with studs.

Us a furring strip close to the inside thickness of the shelf.  Just bolting the brackets through drywall to studs may result in the point load on the individual brackets to crush the drywall and shift.  A furring strip will spread the load and make it less likely for the drywall to crush.

"a tendency to push in creating an indent in the drywall"

A 12 inch wide layout is not very heavy so the pressure on the drywall should be within it's compression tolerance. If you are worried you could add a wider piece of plywood to the wall then attach the shelf bracket to it. More than ultimate strength layout benchwork needs to be stiff. We don't want sags between the supports. The thing that adds stiffness is vertical height in the framing members. 1X4 framing on edge is more than twice as stiff as 1X2 framing. The N scale staging track benchwork shown in my previous post is only about 6 inches wide but I used 1X4 framing so I can support it with brackets spaced about 4 feet apart. I have a liftout for the entry door and adjacent closet that is about 55 inches long and is framed with 4 inch tall laminated plywood sides and is very stiff just supported on the ends. It's possible to build thin stiff shelving but it takes stronger materials and costs a lot more than good old wood. You could frame it with 1X2 welded steel and attach it with L shaped framing plates screwed to the sides of the studs but you'd have to tear up the wall to get in there and do a lot of metal work cutting and welding the framing just to save a few  of inches of shelf thickness. ...DaveBranum

  I had planned to use some

I had planned to use some sort of strip for an anchor, most likely a furring strip or 1x4. Russ, the house is fairly new construction, or what is considered new in this town, built in 1975. It appears that a lot of care was put into making everything straight and very solid. The floor joist all have multiple cross braces between them ect. But I will double check just to make sure. Thanks for pointing that out. Most of the houses in this town are from the 1800's and were built by the Marble Company. You want to see some hurried craftsmanship, you should have a look at some of the houses here. Some of them have rooms that are off square by feet not inches.

Dave your right, the welded steel framing and the ensuing drywall and mud work is way more than I'd want to get in to. At that point I might as well get cracking on finishing the basement.

I'm going to keep playing around with this idea and an overall design. I'm pretty decent with AutoCad so that should help me come up with something on paper and help me work out potential design flaws. I'll be sure to post pictures as I go on this one. I'm kind of eager to see how it turns out. Thanks again everyone for taking the time to give advise and expertise.

Tristan

Angle brackets pointing down or up.

What's the advantage?

They look very clean, but I'm not sure what the advantage(s) would be of having "pockets" (if I understand the design).  I'm using HCDs that I mount a fascia plate to.  The only downside I see is that the cheap L-brackets will be visible somewhat but wiring won't need to be routed inside the shelves.

I've mounted 5-ft doubleslot vertical stanchions for adjustable shelves on two walls already (plan to use extra shelves for storage), but the slots are at different heights (I swore everything was lined up), so I need to shim vertically.  With cheapo brackets, I have fewer screws to move if adjustments are needed.  (Also plan on buying a laser level.  LOL!)

But you can always give it a go - if the floating shelves don't work, you can use them somewhere else around the house, I'm sure.

Take a look at Kevin K's

Take a look at Kevin K's Washington Northern RR, he used the modular shelving brackets to do his, and I think that would give you a nice compromise and save you the over engineering needed to make the floating shelf work.

http://wnrr.net/construction.html

You could easily cut the brackets down short enough to hide them behind a backdrop, or even use them to make a storage shelf below the layout level.

Basically the whole idea

Basically the whole idea behind the floating shelves was to keep the layout aesthetically pleasing. There isn't a purpose behind the pockets, they're just the byproduct of the framing being covered on the bottom to hide the less attractive aspects of a model railroad. I guess I forgot to mention from the start that the layout will be a little bit higher than is the norm, with the top of the benchwork being somewhere around 56 inches. Currently the room that I planned on using is our office. With our house being very small (1000 sq/ft), the room doubles as our second bedroom. The thought was that a higher layout would keep it out of the way for a dresser or desk, and also reduce how much I have to bend over to work on and operate it. I landed on my head from about 10 feet up on my last attempt to jump a mountain bike about 15 years ago, then I had a pretty good wreck on a motorcycle six years ago. My back makes sure to remind me constantly how stupid I was in my younger days and any kind of hunch or lean really tends to make those reminders loud and clear, hence the reason I wanted it up higher. The only reason I wanted to use the floating style was so that everything looked finished and clean. I'm not really all that concerned about thickness, it's not an attempt to make the shelves any less thick than might be the norm. I was planning on them being 4-5 inches thick from the start. I guess the whole idea is just to hide the framing and see if I could get away with not having any angular bracing other than the strip anchored to the wall. If worse come to worse, I can fabricate some angled supports for the bottom if I notice the shelves starting to sag. The modular shelving from Closet Maid is another route I've been considering as I am still trying to figure out what to do for lighting. The system C.M. has would allow for a very easy installation of a second shelf on the top for lighting and give the layout a shadow box look. I had considered not having a top shelf and using track lighting but I'm not sure that is the right way to go. And yes I do plan to grab a laser level

Log Screws?

Why not use several large diameter long log screws in the wall? Drill sufficiently large diameter holes in the frame of the shelf so the screw heads can pass through. Then the shelf simply sits on the screws. No pressure on the drywall, no visible supports, plenty strong, can be removed for layout work, leaves only a few holes in the wall to be patched if ever the layout is removed.

I used 3/4" x 14" hex head self-tapping hardened screws to attach cross rails to uprights on all the horse hitching posts we have. No horse yet has pulled loose a rail. These screws could support 50 layouts sitting on them!

Sounds like you've thought it out

Ok, sounds like you've thought this out and are aware of possible issues.  Time to go for it and let us know how it turns out.

"mounting brackets pointing up rather than down."

The only problem with this is the corner of the bracket has to be much thicker material as it must transfer all the force where a bracket with the leg going down can have a triangular component to widen the leverage. A shelf bracket with a long top leg behind the backdrop and a short bottom leg for leverage would be ideal and can be approximated  with the commercial shelf tracks and clip in shelf brackets. Still not as easy as screwing the shelf to the wall and screwing a metal shelf bracket below it though:> ) .......DaveBranum

Try the IKEA shelf called "LACK"

IKEA has a shelf called "Lack" (at least in Sweden). It is about 10" deep and 43" wide  (the dimensions are 110 X 26 cm) and comes with a metal bracket that you screw on the wall. The shelf is hollow as the one you describe. It then locks in place with two screws on the underside.

I'm sure it will work as it is very light weight. The problem with the shelf tilting a bit can be solved with shims. It can cope with loads between 5 to 15 kg (sorry for the metric units) depending of how good the wall is.

It is cheap and looks good. In Sweden it costs around $ 14.

We have a few of them in our house (not for MR unfortunately) and they have been sitting here for several years.

I think this is a brilliant idea that can be ready in no time. I will give it a try as I have the same problem a you described (too much work and too little spare time). And of top of that; no room. But I have an office which is off limit for the rest of the family.

Good idea Tristan.

I did something kind of like

I did something kind of like a floating shelf.  The pictures explain it best.

Kelly - Beautiful!

Great looking train room!

Thank you Don!

Thank you Don!

One other thing to think about

perhaps it won't be an issue depending on size of layout, # and quality of visitors, but make sure you let people know not to lean or hold on to front of layout.   For instance, when I lift my grandson up to see the layout, he has a tendancy to hold on to the front of the fascia at times.   Probably not a common thing and learned behavior can be ingrained for them not to, but it might ony take once to torque the whole layout down to an angle.

Just a thought

Loren Casey

Maryville,IL

Kelly that is a great looking

Brackets here as well