Model Railroad Instruction

[mihir777]

I have done this I O gauge and I will caution you it gets expensive. I went with this method because it is the only one I knew about. Also scenery below track height has to be planned well in advance when using the woodland scenics foam risers and sheets of foam for scenery base. You also need to pick a starting or "0" height above the plywood just in case you discover that you need a bit more wiggle room for getting your track below another (bridges necessarily take up space below the height of the roadbed, quite a bit depending on the type of bridge. Also just buy foam board instead of using the foam risers for level track, it was cheeper and easier for the grades the foam inclines worked really well. You still need to be careful about vertical easements when transistioning from level track to incline and vice versa. You may have uncoupling problems if you dont, especially in HO scale. A good hot wire cutter (and good ventilation!) is necessary for the foam method of construction.
Ive done the bolt on method before and it is workable. I over engineered by O guage layout (I can walk on it), but it started life as an L-shaped N-scale layout. Bolt on becomes unworkable when you go to try to diassemble it for moving after youve put down scenery. I made this mistake on my O guage layout. I have angled pieces of steel holding the sections of the layout together. The angled steel is attached with counter sunk bolts in the top and nuts on the bottom, and run the length of the 4x8 pieces of plywood. I have 2in blue foam board glued and screwed down on top.

 

[JCitron]

Welcome to the forums, mihir777!

I too have used foam pieces, many years ago now, when building an N-scale layout. The Woodland Scenics parts were terribly expensive even here in the US so I too opted for pieces of foam from the DIY store Home Depot. The problem I ran into with the foam pieces was the release agent used on the plastic caused the solvent glues to not stick the parts together well. The layout was assembled and working well then one day, just before I started plastering, I found the foam had pulled apart from the tension caused by the flex track. Since then I have moved on to Trainz and started with TRS2004 shortly after that incident.

Speaking on Trainz. Please register your copy so we know which version you are using. This will assist us when troubleshooting, should you have a problem, as well as indicate to us that you have not pirated the software. If you have registered your Trainz version(s) and they do not appear here, contact the Helpdesk via the link above, and someone will take care of that for you. The same applies if you registered under another username. Contact the helpdesk and they will merge your accounts so all of your Trainz versions will show on your timeline.

Regards

John