OGR Ad Man - That is one impressive layout. What have I been missing???
Chris....
Thanks so much. I don't think Jim will mind if we hijack the thread a little..
. The skyscrapers are made from a lot of "things". Some are completely scratch built and others are made from old building sets that have been added to or modified in some way. The one that you have circled is made up of thousands of smaller pieces from several old American Skyline building kits that I acquired on ebay. These kits were originally intended to be HO scale but to be honest skyscraper floors vary in height and window size so when built tall (the one you circled is about 6 feet tall) they work just fine in O-scale.
Wood...thanks so much! If you do a search under my regular name "leavingtracks" on the forum, you will see MANY more posts of pictures of my layout.
Alan
Jim's article recommends incandescent lighting to reduce color fading. How much of a concern is fading with CFBs? Most of my whole house, including 50+ recessed cans in the basement train area has been converted to fluorescent bulbs.
I did not receive my copy of the new OGR yeat but I did wont to say that I too saw black ceilings before and they do look great. I guess you have to consider the look you are going for and then do what best fits the plan.
In fact the Choo Choo Barn layout has black ceilings and it looks beautiful, especially when they go into the night sequnces.
As for the floor drains it is a hundred percent true that they are a big pluss. In my case when the plumber installed our new soil line he wonted to put it in the laundry room about five feet from the heating closet. But,because of issues beyound his control it had to be placed at the far end of the basement.
Sure as Murphy's law it leaked about ten years later. Furtunately my brother, who did the concrete work slopped the floor so the water would stay in a one foot wide path down to the drain. This kept the water away from under the platform and my work area. The fall is not noticeable unless you look real close but it got the job done.
My point being is, as stated above the question is not if the water heater will leak, but when?
As for builders doing dumb things when they work in basement I'm sorry to say some of them should be shot!
When the people who lived in my house before me updated the house heater system the plumber had the feed and return pipes five feet off the floor at the heater end of the basement. They took a nice room with a seven foot ceiling and mad it useless to even to safly walk through.
I took the mess out and replaced it with new copper pipes and the system drains perfecly and has been working for twenty-five years. Why did that nitwit do something so dangerous I will never know but I have seen such dumbness handreds of times. Just too lazy to cut and thread the pipe to the proper lengths.
Alan,
Back to the skyscrapers for a moment. Great minds think alike! I thought they were Skyline building kits! I had one as a child. Unfortunately, it was tossed out during one (of many) house clean outs years (decades) ago. I found a couple of boxes at York about a year or so back. I recently got around to putting a building together. Boy, you are right: it seems like a million pieces! And that was for a small one. You say the one I circled is 6'? Wow! That took a lot of kits and time! Kudos!
Back to the basement: For those of you who are building from scratch, let me throw in 2 other pieces of advice:
1. Water and electricity don't play nicely together most of the time. Keep the electric panel properly isolated or distanced from the plumbing.
2. Pipes tend to leak in the most inopportune spots and times. (I think it is a corollary of Murphy's Law.) If possible, run the pipes such that they will be over the layout for the shortest possible distance. You may want a plastic shield over them in that area. Also, be careful running them inside exterior walls in northern climates. (I do not recommend that.)
Chris
LVHR
