new guy
Active Member
WOW! I'm all code 100, never seen 40! You doin N 'scale?
it would be easery if
- Thread starter marriedshades
- Start date
WOW! I'm all code 100, never seen 40! You doin N 'scale?
montanan
Whiskey Merchant
I good starting point is having a plan for what you want. What era are you interested in, what part of the country do you lake or want to model. What kind of a layout do you want, continuous running, point to point, a shelf switching layout. Have a plan.
I started my current HO scale layout in the early 80's after dump N scale because the locomotives at the time were for the most part junk and the available road names were very limited. Not at all like what is available today.
Although my N scale layout had almost 11 scale miles of track, it had no plan and was rather haphazard. Having grown up with relatives working on the Milwaukee Road and the Northern Pacific and having had spent many many hours riding with them, I wanted to recreate what I had learned from them.
Time Period - Easy, the transition era. That was the time period I grew up in and I did want to be able to run some steam, but also really liked the first generation diesels.
Location - Right here where I live. I am very familiar with the local industries and need of the area, but a little more investigation was needed.
Type of layout - I had plenty of room in N scale and could run long trains, but moving to HO scale, space would be more limited. I enjoy switching. Where do the long trains come from?? They come from the freight cars coming and going to industries. I chose a point to point type of layout, with a yard and engine facility at each end, but with the use of three hidden staging tracks, I can run a train continuously around the layout.
Operations - I made a plan for operations. An inbound train would come in from the hidden staging tracks to one of the yards on the layout as an inbound train. The cars would be sorted in the yard and delivered to various industries along the main line while picking up outbound or empties and would then be taken to one of the two yards where they would be made into an outbound train which would be run into the hidden staging tracks. Each town also had a switching problem built into it to be more interesting.
Although the building of the layout was delayed a lot by not having any hobby shops at all in my area, the plan worked for me and I have never lost interest in the way the railroad is run. It can easily take a couple of hours or longer to make a run on the railroad.
I have some very good model railroad friends out of state who I visit on a regular basis. They also went through the same type of planning on both their home and club layouts and although their plans were for a different part of the country and for different operations, their layouts work for them and are very interesting to operate on because a plan was made prior to building their layouts.
I had a number of locomotives and a lot of freight equipment custom painted and ready to roll even before I had enough track down to run them on.
I started my current HO scale layout in the early 80's after dump N scale because the locomotives at the time were for the most part junk and the available road names were very limited. Not at all like what is available today.
Although my N scale layout had almost 11 scale miles of track, it had no plan and was rather haphazard. Having grown up with relatives working on the Milwaukee Road and the Northern Pacific and having had spent many many hours riding with them, I wanted to recreate what I had learned from them.
Time Period - Easy, the transition era. That was the time period I grew up in and I did want to be able to run some steam, but also really liked the first generation diesels.
Location - Right here where I live. I am very familiar with the local industries and need of the area, but a little more investigation was needed.
Type of layout - I had plenty of room in N scale and could run long trains, but moving to HO scale, space would be more limited. I enjoy switching. Where do the long trains come from?? They come from the freight cars coming and going to industries. I chose a point to point type of layout, with a yard and engine facility at each end, but with the use of three hidden staging tracks, I can run a train continuously around the layout.
Operations - I made a plan for operations. An inbound train would come in from the hidden staging tracks to one of the yards on the layout as an inbound train. The cars would be sorted in the yard and delivered to various industries along the main line while picking up outbound or empties and would then be taken to one of the two yards where they would be made into an outbound train which would be run into the hidden staging tracks. Each town also had a switching problem built into it to be more interesting.
Although the building of the layout was delayed a lot by not having any hobby shops at all in my area, the plan worked for me and I have never lost interest in the way the railroad is run. It can easily take a couple of hours or longer to make a run on the railroad.
I have some very good model railroad friends out of state who I visit on a regular basis. They also went through the same type of planning on both their home and club layouts and although their plans were for a different part of the country and for different operations, their layouts work for them and are very interesting to operate on because a plan was made prior to building their layouts.
I had a number of locomotives and a lot of freight equipment custom painted and ready to roll even before I had enough track down to run them on.
I was in N scale. I am now back in HO. You can buy code 40 rail. I tried to use it for a trolley line but I couldn't remove the chemical weathering from the top of the rail. I use code 55 for my branchline. Code 100 is seriously out of scale. Unless you're modeling the 4 track PPR mainline. Real railroads use different sizes of rail. Especially back 90 years ago when I model. Some prototype railroads used track so light that the flanges hit the spikes until the flanges were ground to size.
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montanan
Whiskey Merchant
I totally agree with the track. After having been in N scale, the size of the track really bothered me and when I start my HO scale, I started handlaying code 70 rail and turnouts until my spike gun bit the dust but did complete the layout with Shinohara code 70 track. It looks so much better than code 100.
