model train set on track

Building the Great Experiment Layout 

e*Train Issue: Sep 2024   |   Posted in:

By Bill Fuller, TCA #87-26705 Fall 2024 e*Train

Another move … another new home … and of course another layout. The number of layouts I’ve built over the past seven decades, including those first temporary ovals on the floor, has long faded from memory. Still all have had a few things in common—traditional tubular track, typical plywood-topped tables (once I got off the floor), traditional control tethering the engineer to the transformer, cat litter ballast (when there was any ballast at all), shoehorning as many loops of track as possible into the available space to maximize the number of trains in motion, and putting the whole shebang in a basement room or at least in a large ground-floor closet. Admitting that age and remaining energy levels are such that there probably aren’t many brand-new layouts in my future, I determined that this one would be different from those before. This time, realism was king, and this meant I’d be experimenting with a few techniques I’d never tried before. This layout was going to be the Great Experiment. As with all experiments, some things worked well, some worked okay, and some ended up falling into the “What was I thinking!” category. 

The first consideration had to be addressed very early on, before the new home was even built. Where would this layout go? The house would have a generous, dry crawl space, very handy for storage but not for occupancy unless one wanted to end up a hunchback ringing bells at Notre Dame. If the layout could not go down, could it go up? Thus I broke the first rule of layout location. It would be upstairs in a second-floor room, not in a basement or lower-level den or game room. 

The location decision led directly to other considerations, the first of which was how to construct the tables. Feeling the weight of seven decades of model railroading, I was not eager to also feel the weight of 4×8 plywood sheets going up the stairs, nor was I eager to gouge holes in the brand-new wall beside the stairway with the corners of those sheets. Thus did I break the second rule of layout construction: no plywood! What, then, shall I use? Plenty of 1×4 planks of various lengths were left over from the previous layout where they had been fascia and supports of all sorts. With recycled 2x4s for legs and those 1x4s for framing, building a cross-hatched framework in the new room was straightforward. To provide a solid surface atop the framework, sheets of 2” thick Styrofoam insulation board came home in the bed of the pickup, and then I learned another lesson: Do not cut foam board inside the house. Eight years later, I think I may have all the bits of foam vacuumed up, maybe. 

Another consideration driven by the upstairs location was how to use attic spaces on either side of the train room walls. Despite the builder’s hesitancy to provide access to those unfinished spaces, I was intent on using them, and he finally succumbed to my entreaties and not only put crawl-through doors in the side walls but even built some catwalks to keep me from having to wade through the blown-in insulation. I’m sure he had visions of my missing a rafter hidden below that insulation and crashing through the ceiling into the rooms below. So now that I had access to the attic spaces, how would I use them? 

One of the experiments I was determined to try on this layout was an attempt to hide the fact that, no matter how many tunnels and curves had been built into previous layouts, trains were simply running loops, chasing their tails as it were.

They’d do the same thing on this layout, but that reality was to be hidden as much as possible from the viewer, and that required hiding part of the irregular loop from view. The attic spaces were the answer. Out came the drill and the saw to pierce the room walls and give tracks access to the attics. However, as I soon discovered, there were a couple of tricks to this. 

The first became obvious as the drill bit into something solid: Avoid wall studs. Out came the stud finder, the drill was moved over a bit, and the first hole was through the drywall. The next trick was to avoid hitting any electrical or plumbing fixtures hidden in the walls. Since the room was upstairs, no plumbing fixtures intruded. As for hidden electrical wiring, let’s just say that luck intervened and leave it at that, shall we? 

On the track diagram, visualize room walls just to the right of the three vertical tracks on the far left and just to the left of the three vertical tracks on the far right. Those six tracks are in attic spaces on either side of the visible train room.

Thanks to all the studs and rafters fully exposed to view inside the attic spaces, affixing 1x4s horizontally to support more foam board was pretty straightforward. Thanks to the catwalks my builder had installed, stepping through the ceiling and ending up in the room below was not a huge concern. More problematic was protecting my clothing (and skin) from screws holding the steel roofing panels in place and protruding into the attic just enough to snag a shirt. With thankfully only a few scratches on my back, I glued foam board strips to form vertical walls and finally laid yet more foam board across the tops of those walls to create a covered tunnel for the trains where they passed through the attic spaces, the thought being to provide them some protection from both dust and temperature extremes, which the tunnels do with moderate (if not total) success. 

One challenge remained: Since I was using the tunnels in the attic spaces to hold passing sidings for staging trains out of sight, how was I to know where to stop the staged trains so that they didn’t foul the switches at the ends of those sidings? On a previous layout with concealed sidings, I had insulated one section of track at each end of the sidings and connected the insulated sections to lights on the control panel. If a train was on the insulated track, the light illuminated, so I was careful to stop a train when lights at each end of its siding were dark. This time, though, I got fancy and mounted a couple of small, cheap security cameras inside the tunnels with a couple of small, cheap monitors mounted on the control panel. Now I could actually see where the staged trains were stopped, or at least I could until the infrared lights on one of the cameras gave out, plunging everything into darkness. That camera being particularly challenging to reach for anyone other than a professional contortionist, I stuck a light bulb wired into the layout lighting circuit into that end of the tunnel and restored the camera’s eyesight. 

One of the attic storage track monitors shows a lionel shay ready to enter the main line through switch #12 on the track diagram.

One unforeseen phenomenon related to those security cameras is the occasional sight of some monster insect lumbering alongside a parked train after the creature penetrated both the attic soffit vents and my foam board tunnel enclosures,. My brain may be telling me that it’s only a normal-sized Leptoglossus occidentalis (western conifer seed bug, colloquially referred to simply as “ugly bug” in our house), but alongside an O scale locomotive, it looks like an escapee from a grade-B horror movie. 

Another never-before-tried technique on the new layout was the use of a more scale-like track. Heretofore, good old tubular track had always been the rule, but now I wanted to try something with a more prototypical appearance and chose Atlas-O track this time. The serendipitous thing about this was that the Christmas season was rapidly approaching, and my family was all after hints for gifts. Using SCARM track-planning software, I produced a list of every straight, curved, and switch track I wanted, let the family divvy up the list among themselves, and then had only a short wait until Christmas morning, when the track I needed miraculously appeared! 

Laying the track on a foam roadbed, I realized that it needed one more thing to look realistic—ballast. Quite a few bags of O-scale gray granite were laid in (and more placed on order since I always underestimated how much I needed), and I purloined a long-handled teaspoon from the kitchen to ladle it between the ties and along the outside of the rails until the foam roadbed was nicely covered. Working with a small paint brush, a mustard jar of diluted white glue, and a baby’s medicine dropper to apply that glue, I began working my way around all the tracks exposed in the train room. I confess that here I cheated by not putting ballast in those out-of-sight attic tunnels, thereby shortening the process to only about five weeks or so. Hey, I was having fun! 

Using foam roadbed for the first time in my layout-building life, I did learn a few things, such as that adding a quarter inch of elevation under the track reduces the clearance above the track by an equal amount. At least this helped my resolve to continue thinning the collection by selling the Lionel auto carriers and MTH firecars that would no longer clear the tunnel portals. 

The track looks great on raised roadbed and ballast, but remember that raising the track reduces the overhead clearance by an equal measure.

A few years later, I found myself adding a Lionel lift bridge to the layout, whereupon I discovered that K-Line scale cabooses with antennae atop their cupolas would not clear the cross members of the bridge towers any more than the smokestacks on MTH 19th Century steamers would. One would think that my experience with the tunnel portals would have taught me to check vertical clearances this time, but no! Being more of an operator than a pure collector, I fixed this new clearance problem by attacking the steel cross members of the bridge towers with a Dremel Mototool.

A Lionel lift bridge with a notch routed out of a lower cross member to allow caboose antennae and MTH 19th century steamer smokestacks to clear.

While we’re on the subject of Lionel’s lift bridge, we may be reminded that the wood used for studs and rafters in stick-built homes is subject to just a bit of expansion and contraction depending on seasonal temperatures. If one installs a lift bridge during winter, when cold temperatures contract wood framing, and if that bridge spans an open aisle in the layout, one soon learns that the bridge becomes immobile in the summer when hot temperatures and expansion of one’s house framing contrive to wedge it immovably into place. A thoroughly unrealistic 1×4 placed across the end of the aisle every summer ensures that the bridge can be operated year-round. Ah, the things we learn through layout construction! 

In summer, a 1×4 spans this aisle in front of the power cords to prevent thermal expansion of the house framing from jamming the lift bridge in place.

Creating a small fishing pond on the layout was yet another learning experience. First, I learned that even the tiniest unseen pinhole in the plaster base will eventually generate bubbles in Woodland Scenics Realistic Water even after it’s thoroughly cured. Also, placing the metal figure of a boy in an inner tube on the pond turned out to be less than an ideal thought as, over months, the boy very slowly sank into the depths. He and his inner tube now float on a stream elsewhere on the layout where water is represented by the very solid surface of unpainted blue foam board. He and I are equally happy for him to be there. 

After slowly subsiding into the “realistic water” of the fishing pond, the boy and his inner tube are much happier “floating” on the solid water of a stream elsewhere on the layout.

Every so often, something serendipitous comes along in the most unlikely place and just begs to be put to use on a layout. One day, my wife and I were in Michaels Arts and Crafts Store replenishing our supply of paint and, on our way to the checkout counter, we passed through an area of scrapbooking materials. Hanging on a rack were some sheets of embossed but still essentially two-dimensional objects presumably intended to enliven the appearance of artsy scrapbook pages. Among them were some designs of bicycles and rowboats that looked to be very near O scale size. Those could not be passed up! A couple of the bicycles ended up pasted to the sides of houses that are set a bit back from the front of the layout, far enough that the two-dimensional nature of the cycles is not obvious, and they look as though youngsters have left them leaning against the wall of their house while they’ve popped inside for a cold drink or to do their homework or some such thing. One of the rowboats, meanwhile, has found a home on the bank of the fishing pond formerly occupied by our boy and his inner tube. Scenery items abound and can, it seems, be found in the most unlikely places. 

The rowboat is a two-dimensional ornament for a scrapbook page.

By the way, I should confess that, notwithstanding my claim that this layout was to be my Great Experiment in using new techniques, I’ve always been a traditional operator using what we now refer to as conventional control. Still, I did not wish to remain bound to one spot in the room where the transformers were located. Luckily, when MTH introduced the Z-4000 transformer, the company also offered its 40-4001 Z-4000 Remote Commander System, which incorporates a handheld remote with all of the controls that are on the transformer itself. While not a command control system since it “talks” to the transformer rather than to the locomotives, this marvelous device does enable an operator to wander around the train room while still controlling locomotives in a conventional environment. Unhappily for us conventional operators, as MTH turned its attention to true command control and enhanced ProtoSound systems, the Remote Commander System disappeared from the product line. 

While we’re talking about the layout’s operation, look back at the track plan in the first photo of these ruminations. All the toggle switches will remind everyone that this is a conventionally controlled layout, but tracing all the possible routes will also reveal the number of trains that can be run at one time. That’s right: only one! Yes, there are enough insulated sidings, some in view and more in the attic spaces, to hold seven decently long trains, but only one at a time can make a complete circuit of the layout. With an entire room devoted to the new layout, why create such a limitation? My latest previous layout hosted six trains in motion, but therein lay a problem. Six O gauge trains running at the same time are noisy, the clatter overwhelming all the nifty sound effects—cab chatter, passenger station sounds, radio traffic, and so on—that our modern-era engines can play. Also, if switches and alternate routes are part of the plan, avoiding any “cornfield meets” means keeping an eye on the whereabouts of all the trains, and I found myself so busy doing so that I had no time to enjoy the beautiful side rod motion of any particular steamer. Then there’s the matter of realism. In over seven decades, I’ve never lived in a rail-congested part of the country, and watching a single train in motion mimics what I typically see in the 1:1 scale world. The layout does host just a bit more action than this, though, since city streets do include K-Line Superstreets (now Williams by Bachmann E-Z Streets) that are not part of the track diagram and three streetcars trundle through the community quite independently of the trains. 

In closing these ruminations, I believe there may come a point beyond which layout detailing is more the result of some obsession than of rational creativity. It occurs to me that I may have crossed that fine line by having an operating MTH traffic light pointing toward the back of the layout, a view of which can be attained only by crawling some distance under the tables and standing in an isolated access aisle between the layout and the far wall of the train room. Or perhaps it’s the fact that several nicely detailed figures of children at play occupy the backyards of a row of houses that effectively screen them from view. Then there’s the small company of hobos hidden behind the engine house. 

Detail overkill? Neither the operating traffic signal nor the group of hobos nor the playing children can be seen except by crawling under the layout to a maintenance aisle at the back!

With those admissions, I say, “Enough!” But then I’ve said that several times before while adding to this Great Experiment of a layout. In any event, building it has been a fun (and sometimes challenging) learning experience, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed sharing a few of my escapades with it.