no basements in fla

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blackz28

blackz28

Well-Known Member
god i have to plan a layout with big boys in mind , i had a huge basement in a new house in new hampshire ,but down here , wow i gotta hope for a room or a garage or a seperate building :confused: i gotta be realistic thou , so it should be interesting
i just hope i can get started soon , i have looked at alot of houses & man the square footage is wayyyyyyyyyyyy diffrent then from up north lol
im paring down my roster & looking at some of the plans you guys have done to help me ;),
 
One of the hardest things for me when I moved from up north to Florida was giving up the basement. There are a few around though, I even found one across the street from the beach, with a basement! WAY too expensive...lol
 


joe circus said:
One of the hardest things for me when I moved from up north to Florida was giving up the basement. There are a few around though, I even found one across the street from the beach, with a basement! WAY too expensive...lol
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so joe what did you end up doing for layout space ??
 
blackz28 said:
so joe what did you end up doing for layout space ??
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I've been without for a bit, I just got a room back since the daughter moved out ( again ), so I'm going to go with a 2 foot wide doughnut 20' by 12'.

I'm gonna start a thread with questions seeking suggestions in the layout forum in a day or two. Then I'll build it step by step in a thread.
 
blackz28 said:
heres a couple of pics of some of my big boys . my wounded MTH & MY ATHEARN
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Those are a couple good looking Big Boys. Those would look good pulling a long string of coal hoppers. Hopefully you can get something built that would make those two look right at home.
 
Pick a room and build an elevated track all around on a shelf. I have a 6in wide, 14ft x 16ft elevated run about 6 ft up from the floor (eye level). Most scenery is in the corners. This is HO (22in radius) but i have had one in G scale also.
You can suspend it from the ceiling or just make it a shelf on the wall.
On the main floor i have a 3ft x 15ft table layout against one wall that is for N gauge and Ho (18in radius). I Can run a combination of 2 HO and 3 N gauge trains with DC at the same time.
I like the elevated track because i can see what is going on with the train or the engines without bending over the edge of a table. Easy to wire without sitting on the floor. Can create gaps in the shelf to install bridges.

Bob
 
blackz28 said:
god i have to plan a layout with big boys in mind , i had a huge basement in a new house in new hampshire ,but down here , wow i gotta hope for a room or a garage or a seperate building :confused: i gotta be realistic thou , so it should be interesting
i just hope i can get started soon , i have looked at alot of houses & man the square footage is wayyyyyyyyyyyy diffrent then from up north lol
im paring down my roster & looking at some of the plans you guys have done to help me ;),
Click to expand...

If it makes you feel any better, a long time friend in Pensacola had the same problem. He had a small house, but it did have an attached 1 car garage. He built a simple, double track twice around in it, with a large freight yard and a smaller passenger yard. He was into big UP steam, so it naturally followed that scenario with a minimum radius of 42". That was so his brass engines, over 30, including a 9000 class monster, could go around without a problem. Although he had 2 switchers an 0-8-0, and an 0-6-0, the next smallest loco he had was a 2-8-2. Everything else was big UP or ATSF steam. No diesels allowed.

It was nothing for him to have a Challenger pulling a passenger train, (15 cars), in one direction, and a Big Boy pulling a reefer block, (40 cars) going the other. He wasn't an operator in the sense that we think of today, he just loved to watch them run.
 
those big boys must have sent you back a bit of money - As for the layout there are many layouts that maximize space when done correctly. Youtube has a lot of great ideas.

Making use of bridges that go over the track you already placed works well for me in tight spaces
 


One of the houses I lived in in Cape Coral had two garages. Not a two car garage, or even an addition to the one car garage, but an honest to god second garage at the back of the house. I of course appropriated it for my trains, and had a great n scale empire there.
That one was on 18th terrace.
 
bnsf971 said:
One of the houses I lived in in Cape Coral had two garages. Not a two car garage, or even an addition to the one car garage, but an honest to god second garage at the back of the house. I of course appropriated it for my trains, and had a great n scale empire there.
That one was on 18th terrace.
Click to expand...

18th terrace?? sw or ne or nw, se lol:p
 
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