Building a non-Japanese layout - Part I

After quite a delay, here's finally part 1 of a series of building reports on the non-Japanese prototype layout I'm building with my father. As mentioned in an earlier post, the layout will be computer controlled and include all sorts of details that should turn it into an interesting layout to look at (in about 10 years, when it's finally "done" :))

Rather then talk to much about what the layout is supposed to be, let's just get started with the meat of the business. For starters, here's the latest version of the track plan. By now, some things have changed, but it's still pretty accurate.

26 The "Moritzburg" track plan

Benchwork

The benchwork is a fairly standard open frame affair. We've used 18x69mm pine wood for the frame itself, and 44x44mm pine wood for the legs. Each leg also has a wheel mounted under it, so it's easy to move the entire table around and gain easy access to the otherwise hard to reach places.

The computer desk on the picture will later be used not only for the PC that'll control the layout, but also for the digital command station(s), booster(s), transformers etc.

20 The completed benchwork

Laying track

Since we have a fairly detailed track plan, we used Railmodeller's feature to print out 1:1 scale parts of the track plan. The initial idea was to then glue the track plan on to the wooden rail beds and basically just place the track exactly where it should go according to the track plan. However, we soon found out that the paper expanded ever so slightly, and the track plan ended up not being 1:1 anymore. The fact that we also forgot to glue some cork onto the wooden base didn't help much either ;)

21 Testing the 1:1 scale track plan printout

 

As the saying goes, "if at first you don't success, destroy all evidence that you tried"... We quickly glued cork on the base for the station, and so hid the horribly disfigured glued down track plan. And since we're supposed to learn from our mistakes, we decided to not use glue again to keep the 1:1 track plan in place, but in stead we opted for some needle-like thingies (I can't for the life of me figure out what they're called in english at the moment :)) It took quite some patience and care to line everything up, but the result is that you immediately get a good idea of what the station are is going to look like in full scale.

22 A better way of keeping the 1:1 scale track plan printout in place

 

So, the next step was to actually put all the track in place. Before that though, we decided to paint all the visible track, to give them a somewhat old, used look. To achieve that, we painted the rails themselves a rust colour, and the ties/sleepers got a flat dark brown colour. After that, the track is put in place with a screw and some metal rings. The reason for this, is that the track will be glued down when ballasting them, which means we don't need ugly, noisy nails. We did find out that the screw and rings method has the rather big disadvantage of not allowing test driving, so pretty soon we skipped the rings and just used screws.

23 Painted Minitrix turnout up close and personal

 

After a while, the main station area was starting to look like something ;)

24 The tracks at "Moritzburg" station

25 Detail of the tracks at "Moritzburg" station

 

 

Posted: Tue, Aug 10th 2010. Last update: Tue, Aug 10th 2010. Tagged as

Comments

Submitted by quinntopia on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 06:30

Very inspiring....I've been very inspired by how good your trackwork - and use of the Minitrix track - is looking on this layout!

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