How would one go about doing this to reconnect the track easily?
Same as Chris did - lay continuous track across the joint/gap, solder them to something that stays put (a brass screw or a PC-board tie glued to the table), and then cut the rail at the gap.
For alignment, you can either use some kind of tab and slot (e.g. patternmaker dowels), or just align by hand and then hold the two sides together with a C-clamp under the table - depending on whether you will be taking it down many times a day/during the running session, or whether you will only take it down once in a while, and mostly will be ducking under to get into the layout (very doable if you put the layout at chest height for a grown man, and let the kids stand on a chair or platform/step to reach things.
For power to the liftout, a simple solution I have seen is having an L-shaped metal bracket on the liftout go into an U-shaped metal bracket on the table - one such combo for each rail.
Lots of ways to do this.
This would allow me to do a continuous loop around the room. I was leaning against doing a continuous loop and instead doing a reversal loop at each end,
In H0 scale, reversal (also known as turnback) loops take a
lot of depth.
If you want one that handles passenger cars, you would need one that has a radius of no less than 2.5 or 3 times the length of your longest rolling stock.
An 80-foot passenger car is about 11" long in H0 scale - so you would want a radius of about 27-30" (although some H0 scale passenger cars will go through 24" radius, but looking somewhat toylike with all the overhang, especially on the outside of the curve.
Anyways - say you have a 24" radius turnback curve. That is a 48" (4 foot) diameter from center of track to center of track. Add a little to not have half the track hanging outside the table and a little for safety, and we are talking something like 52" of table depth (aisle to wall) at this point for a turnback curve. Your benchwork would form a big square - between 4x4 and 5x5 feet big, needing a hole in the middle you can duck under the table and into to get at, if the big blob was located along the walls.
In contrast, on a doughnut-shaped layout, the center of your curve is inside the doughnut hole (the operator pit), so the benchwork can be pretty narrow.
Illustration in H0 scale:
For N scale, you can divide all dimensions by 1.8 (160 / 87.1) - so the equivalent of a nice 32" radius in H0 scale would be 30 / 1.8 = 18" radius in N scale, while the equivalent of 24" radius in H0 scale would be 13" radius in N scale.
A table for an 13" radius 270 degree turnback curve would be about 30" deep - which you can reach across from one side.
So turnback loops are much better in N scale than H0 scale.
Also, I understand everyone's concern with keeping the depth limited to 30", however, I wasn't planning on placing track all the way against the wall, therefore I don't feel it's a big concern and will allow me to make use of more space.
Try to set up an experiment using some pieces of discarded carboard or an old door.
Set it up first at waist height - now you can reach further into the layout, but at the cost of everything looking toylike when you look down on it, and your back will hurt as you try to do work _under_ the layout. To duck under by the door will be impossible for a grown man.
Then set up at chest height. Now you are looking into the scene rather than down at the scene. So you can create an
illusion of depth by only modeling the front of buildings.
Now think about what happens if you put some buildings along the front of the layout, that you will have to reach across to reach things behind them.
Think about RR cars on tracks closer to the aisle. Think about trees and other things that will snag on your shirt sleeves as you reach for things.
Going deeper than 30" is not recommended.
Scenery wise, some of the really great builders are going far narrower - having shelves that in places are merely 6-8" deep (where there is just a single track passing through the landscape). But 18-24" deep is a more common depth for scene that has more track in it.
Btw - just to throw in another plug for N scale - in N scale, 24" deep is about the equivalent of 42" deep in H0 scale, in terms of what you can fit of buildings and scenery.
I am still undecided on HO or N scale. I know HO is the most common, however, it looks like N scale has grown considerably since I was a kid. I am just concerned with detail as we would like it to be highly detailed. Can anyone give me some advantages and drawbacks of each of these scales?
Functionally, both have a lot of good stuff available. I have discussed some space considerations above - basically N allows you to run longer cars, longer trains and fit more scenery in a given amount of space, but at the cost of each item being smaller.
To take an example - in a siding that is 4 feet (48") long, you can fit either 8H0 scale 40' cars (each car is 5.5" long in H0 scale), or 16 N scale 40' cars.
If you plan on doing a lot of superdetailing of cars and engines - cutting off parts and replacing them with home made or specially bough detail parts, then N is smaller and harder to handle - depending on your eyesight and steadiness of hand, you might need an optivisor and more patience in N scale.
If your delight is watching moving parts or small details on a steam engine up close, then H0 scale offer more detail (since it is bigger).
If you are going to run stuff right out of the box, then the difference in size is not that important.
Personally, I picked H0 scale, since my eyesight is not good, and I wasn't planning to run long trains or long cars anyways.
Also, what is meant when people refer to a switch layout?
A switching layout is a layout that is focused
more on picking up and delivering railroad cars than on running through the landscape. Or even focused
only on picking up and delivering cars.
You can often build smaller layouts if you don't try to simulate a run through many miles of landscape. One mile in reality would in 1:87 scale be 60 feet, and in 1:160 scale be about 33 feet, if you just compress it true to scale.
Most people do not have the space for a really long run. Doing switching along the way or doing just switching means that things slowed down - instead of running a loop of the layout in 60 seconds, it might take 60 minutes to sort cars, pick up cars and deliver cars.
Here are two examples of purely switching layouts in H0 scale:
"32nd street" - 8 feet x 15" in my living room, inspired by a Byron Henderson design
Here is another one, an L-shaped design by Robert Beaty, for a corner, with far more room for buildings and scenery:
But it is not a given that children (or adults) will find a
purely switching layout fun - kids (and many adults) tend to prefer to have the option of running trains continuously - which demands some kind of closed loop.
Or modeling something that naturally goes back and forth like pendulum - like subways, commuter trains, trams, interurbans or something like that - these styles of layouts can also be automated to run in display mode - in very little space.
Lots of options - what will work well for you is dependent on what you want to model - long trains running through the mountains, an engine with three cars in an industry area, a train hauling ore out of a mine, an engine terminal or whatever
Smile,
Stein
