These are some of the things I learned from building my ‘practice’ layout and will be taking note of when planning and building my new layout –
General
- Spiders are the enemy! – closely followed by dust. I sealed the loft against the big scary ones but it doesn’t seem to stop the spindly ones that you can hardly see that make loads of webs that get in your face (and they shit over everything!). This leads on to…
- Spring clean – regularly hoover the entire layout room including all the nooks and crannies. Move stuff and hoover behind it.
- I’m really ham-fisted and have crap close-to eyesight – so it’s probably best I buy locos, etc. ready-made rather than trying to do things to them myself. I always end up breaking bits off them or stopping them from working (or both!).
- Keep boxes for everything – now I’m moving house I wish I had kept more boxes that things came in, such as the long lengths of Flexi track and the point motors. (I always have my wife’s voice in my head “why do you need to keep all that rubbish”!).
- I can’t solder – don’t even think about trying it again, there’s always a way around it.
Loft Preparation –
- Cover the silver foil – maybe with white hardboard stapled to battens with white duck tape over the joins. (to try to stop it looking like I’m growing drugs!)
- Make the loft hatch bigger – if I can and get a nice easy-to-use wooden ladder. It just makes it so much easier to go up and down to the loft and get stuff in or out of it.
Layout Design –
- The importance of a fiddle yard – I didn’t really have a proper fiddle yard and ended up parking trains on the mainline section. I need to be able to store many full-length trains off the main scenic sections. Potentially this could be at a lower level but I would prefer to avoid this and just have it out of sight at the same level.
- Don’t make curves too tight – although most locos cope with this OK it’s not ideal. Diesel locos seem to cope with it better than steam ones.
- Put more (gentle) curves in the scenic sections – this adds more interest and looks more realistic (although I naturally seem to prefer straights because of my OCD nature).
- Tunnel – If I have a tunnel on the four-track mainline again I need to make it a double entrance and two singles instead of two doubles.
Layout Build –
- Make room for backscenes – lots of areas had a sloping loft roof covered in silver foil coming up from the trackbed which looks rubbish.
- Use bigger timber – for the baseboard frames. Looking at the old layout now the timber frames seem very small and thin. Maybe build a frame and then rest it on
the cross members between joists. Ease of access – try to avoid having to lean over or stretch too far. There were bits of the old layout that were virtually impossible to work on because they were out of comfortable reach. Maybe don’t have the baseboard up against the wall and leave a gap around the back. This also applies to the access to the undersides of the baseboards.- Make wiring neat from the start – don’t have it hanging down and flapping around in the way. Install the bus wire between regularly spaced terminal blocks and connect dropper wires using crimp-on connectors. Drill holes in cross members under the baseboard to put the wires through.
- Black at the back – From watching hundreds of YouTube videos the convention seems to be that you have black and red bus wires and the black one is always attached to the rail nearest the rear of the layout. I did this other way around on my old layout (red at the rear?).
- Pin track at the ends of sleepers, not in the middle – it looks much better in scenic sections. When you do it in the middle of the sleeper it can ‘bow’ and stand out like a sore thumb. It’s OK in the fiddle yard or other hidden areas though as it uses fewer pins and is easier and quicker.
- Raise the fast lines – the middle lines of the four-track ECML seem to be slightly higher in pictures than the outer two (slow) lines so I may use thicker cork for these. (UPDATE – had this confirmed by an ex BR employee so will definitely be doing this)
- Have a workbench – try to make room for a workbench area within the layout for working on models as well as an area for putting a laptop for controlling the layout.