First, to repeat what has been said before by others. The information in the forum has been incredibly valuable. I want to thank you all for sharing what you know, along with your mistakes and your excitement.
tl;dr I'm building a temp layout to learn the basics. Think of it as a playground to experiment in before building a more permanent layout. What features and techniques would you recommend learning?
A little over one year and 2,700 miles ago I started building my first layout.
Last October I expressed an interest in having a train to run around our Christmas tree that year and my Wife encouraged that I buy one.
This was my return to the hobby after about thirty years. The last train I ran was my dad's Lionel 1105 set along with another Lionel steam loco he had and have clear memories of a giraffe car. I ended up buying a Lionel Super Chief set and shortly after a few more items from Eastside Trains in Kirkland, Washington. It was exciting to see both the advancements and the things that have stayed the same in the hobby.
That idea of running the a train around the Christmas tree soon changed into building a simple 4x8 table.
And then again three months later when we found out the house we were renting was going to be listed for sale. This was a house we'd have no interest in buying and with that everything was packed up and the table given away as scrap.
We ended up driving from Seattle to Detroit, with a stop in Louisville, KY to see family. Then after staying in a hotel for three months, we had our offer on a house accepted and shortly moved into our new home. It took another three months of unpacking and getting settled into the new house, before I was able to start thinking about the layout again.
This time I'm starting off with a 6x10 starter table from Mianne. I have enough pieces of plywood left to start thinking about where and how I might want to expand. I did have it in the garage for a bit, but I'll be moving it to a larger area in our basement.
I've picked up a few more trains while waiting for things to settle and a second transformer (Z-4000) to add to my existing GW-180.
I have a few ideas that I'm still working out. Nothing specific yet, just broad ideas that will set the character of what I end up building.
“imagination… the idea, supersedes technique.” —Syd Mead
That quote from Syd Mead (industrial designer and futurist) has been guiding the layout, And while I don't want to limit my ideas, I do realize I need to get experience with some basics.
With the Z-4000 and GW-180 I can support three lines… so I figure on having a temporary layout to wire up, learn how to set up and use blocks, a little switching action, add crossover between the loops, and may try doing an incline on one of them. I'm thinking of it as a “prototype-of-prototype“ layout.
- Outer loop O48 curves (dark green) wired as one block.
- Inner loop O36 curves (orange and light blue) with one passing siding (dark red) and wired as three blocks.
- Middle loop O36 and O31 curves (33.5 compound curve?) (light green) wired as one block with one small yard (dark blue) wired as three blocks.
Right now each loop is either conventional or LC. I do have the new MTH DCS WTIU on preorder and plan on adding a Base3 later.
If I parked an engine in each spur(?) of the yard, I realize I'll need a place to park the cars. And I like the idea of eventually adding crossover so a train can move from one loop to the next.
Besides the learning outcomes listed above are there any other basics that I should consider covering? Remember this is a temporary layout that I will have no issues removing from the table. These would be small experiments to see how different methods and techniques work together.
Thanks for reading.
