No real disasters, but a few things I might have done differently... When we moved from our old house to our present one, 26 years ago, I brought my old layout over in sections to a dedicated room in my new, finished basement. But things intervened, and I wasn't able to reconstruct the layout...for the next 20 years! In the meantime things happened and it became necessary to use the layout space for some other things. But my wife and I decided to add two rooms to the house, with one being a study for her and a dedicated room for a new layout on the main floor. The room is 14' x 13' 8" inside, which necessitated redesigning the layout. I created a folded dogbone with one yard inside one loop and a smaller yard in the other. The setup is for continuous running, as I initially started in DC and like running passenger trains, so the track plan may not be ideal for switching, though I have plenty of freight rolling stock. I would have liked to have had multiple levels, but county inspection code requires windows large enough and low enough to enable a person to "escape" through them in case of fire. That meant that the lower level had to be no more than 32" AFL, although on the "blind" wall the level is 36" AFL. This results in a 3 percent grade with curves at each end, but my motor power can handle it with trains that are short enough to be reasonable appearing. One thing that resulted from using some of the structure from the old layout was having framing in places where I would have liked to have operating grade crossing gates. Since I do have flashers and bell at that point, I made it into a country road.
As to "disasters", the main one happened recently when I installed a DCC with sound decoder in the tender of one of my steam locomotives. Everything was fine...for about two minutes. Then the thing shorted out (not sure where), and burned a hole in the side of the plastic tender body! I removed the carcass of the decoder and sent it back to the manufacturer (waiting for action from them), and converted back to DC. I patched the hole with a plate that looks like the tender suffered some mishap, and the engine shop welded a plate on the tank! You have to look closely to see it anyway. Oh, and there was a semi-disaster when a string of boxcars straightened out on a sharp spur curve and took a dive of 261 scale feet (36") to the floor! Fortunately, these were old, old kits, and the only thing that happened was the doors popped out of their channels. These were quickly replaced, and a series of "fence posts" (6d finishing nails) were added to the edge of the layout where the accident happened. I may even add in some "chainlink" fence material between the poles, though it would make grabbing the cars more difficult, and the poles are close enough to prevent another dive.
