Small Layout Plans.

coop2 said:
Reading your post give me an idea. Why not build an interface (track and train control panel) like you would have on a real live model railroad and interface it with Trainz program. Way beyond my know how, but I bet someone could do it! I looked at your pdf file and it brought back memories of my model railroad days. I'm thinking of changing my whole approach to Trainz. Half the fun of model railroading is building the road and with Trainz that would be interesting. I like your ideas.
Click to expand...
I have heard of things like being done with custom built interfaces to run Trainz and someone even showed me a circuit diagram a couple of years ago, - but that kind of thing is definitely outside of my skill set.
 
KotangaGirl said:
That is certainly a lot of books, - thanks very much for posting the link.
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That is a lot of books!

If you sign up, you can download copies of the books. These are on loan and I'm sure the links will expire, but that might be long enough to be able to save out, meaning copy plans we want for model railroads. Having an image already downloaded is a lot easier than scanning. I have the 101 Track Plans book by Linn Westcott. There are some nice plans in there but scanning is a pain.

I just signed up and "borrowed" the 101 Track Plans. I can't download the book unless I borrow the book for 14-days, but I have full access to it and I used Windows Screen capture to snag a layout worth modeling. This is no different than going to the library and photocopying pages for the projects. I recommend giving credit in the descriptions if a plan is used for a route published to the DLS.
 
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kalmbach have a few books on the Trains.com site, published by Model Railroader magazine that may be of interest.

All are Original art published as pdf.

Track Plan oriented:

SHELF LAYOUTS FOR MODEL RAILROADS - Iain Rice (one of my personal favorites)

101 Track Plans For Model Railroaders - Linn H. Westcott

Layout Construction:

Scenery techniques for Toy trains - Peter H. Riddle

Operating Related:

Milk Trains and Traffic - Jeff Wilson

Rolling Stock \ Content Creation:

25 FREIGHT CAR PROJECTS - Edited by Randy Rehberg

I also found many MR Mag Supplements which I am still sorting through, as well as O Gauge and Tin Plate Toy Train related documents.
Have fun with the above and I will post the more useful supplements after sorting through.

Cheers
Chris
 
In addition to the plan books, Kalmbach's other operations books are really helpful. I have their Track Plans for Realistic Operation by John Armstrong. I purchased the book in the 80s and was able to view it online after subscribing to Archive.org because I find reading stuff online a lot easier because I can increase the size of the text and images. The realistic operations book shows layouts for yards and terminals which really is invaluable for us. Like many people here, I find creating those things extremely difficult. Showing a short detail of a terminal area is enough to get the tracks laid out properly for better operations. The same with yards with the yard lead and other tracks. Laying the tracks parallel is another issue but this book gets me in the right direction.

I also have their Nine N-Scale Layouts book in print and I have taken a couple of the plans from there and made a couple of routes out of them. One of them is on the DLS, although it's quite old now. The Scenic and Relaxed was always one of my favorites and was the basis of my own layout that I had back in 2002-2004 before I retired real models for the virtual ones due to space, damage, and health.
 
Here are a few Track Plan Supplements also available from Trains.com.

Track Plans:

28 Track Plans for medium-sized spaces

8 Great Track Plans for small spaces
www.trains.com

8 Great Track Plans for Small Spaces | ModelRailroader.com

Download this free PDF for a HO and N scale plan, a waterfront railroad layout, a small shelf Union Pacific inspired layout, and a three-in-one layout plan from Model Railroader.
www.trains.com www.trains.com

6 Railroads you can model

5 Easy Track Plans

5 Compact Track Plans

Compact Track Plans and Layouts

Easy 4x8 layouts you can build

Two Great Layouts for beginners

Model railroads for small spaces

The Art of Model Railroading - By Frank Ellison (all 6 parts)

The Red Oak layout

Voodoo and palmettos - A modern industrial switching layout on a shelf - Lance Mindheim

Designing, scenicking, and operating a double-deck layout

Cheers
Chris
 
caroper said:
Here are a few Track Plan Supplements also available from Trains.com.

Track Plans:

28 Track Plans for medium-sized spaces

8 Great Track Plans for small spaces
www.trains.com

8 Great Track Plans for Small Spaces | ModelRailroader.com

Download this free PDF for a HO and N scale plan, a waterfront railroad layout, a small shelf Union Pacific inspired layout, and a three-in-one layout plan from Model Railroader.
www.trains.com www.trains.com

6 Railroads you can model

5 Easy Track Plans

5 Compact Track Plans

Compact Track Plans and Layouts

Easy 4x8 layouts you can build

Two Great Layouts for beginners

Model railroads for small spaces

The Art of Model Railroading - By Frank Ellison (all 6 parts)

The Red Oak layout

Voodoo and palmettos - A modern industrial switching layout on a shelf - Lance Mindheim

Designing, scenicking, and operating a double-deck layout

Cheers
Chris
Click to expand...
I have a bunch of these books on my bookshelf. Thank you for the online supplements to those versions.
 
A lot of those are PDFs they use to sell, I guess there is no market for them anymore. I'm surprised that Model Railroader is still around. You have to have Rod Stewart's money to have a model railroad these days. Back when I was real active in the 60s and early 70s, my entire room sized layout didn't cost more than $200 total. That would barely buy a nice Christmas tree layout today. It is amazing what 55 years of the government running deficits does to the value of the dollar.
 
wreeder said:
A lot of those are PDFs they use to sell, I guess there is no market for them anymore. I'm surprised that Model Railroader is still around. You have to have Rod Stewart's money to have a model railroad these days. Back when I was real active in the 60s and early 70s, my entire room sized layout didn't cost more than $200 total. That would barely buy a nice Christmas tree layout today. It is amazing what 55 years of the government running deficits does to the value of the dollar.
Click to expand...
That and the fact that real models are a collector's item now like rare baseball cards and whatnot. Instead of manufacturing models to stock hobby store shelves, the manufacturers make limited edition runs. The sad part is they don't even manufacture them in the US anymore either. The models are made inexpensively in China and other low wage countries and are marked up like crazy when sold here. The limited editions keep the price up higher because the demand is there not by people wanting to build model railroads like we do. They instead collect them like the aft mentioned baseball cards, or bottles of wine. There was an article about this some years ago that mentioned this was due to the new round of retirees using their retirement to return to the things in their childhood such as model trains, and also finding themselves again by joining motorcycle clubs and buying Harley Davidson motorcycles, along with the garb, to go along with the bikes. They don't buy the trains to enjoy them and instead keep them in boxes on shelves. About 4 years ago, another Trainzer and I along with my brother, went to the Big-E show in Springfield, MA. There were "bargains" alright. A Thomas starter set cost $199 and people were walking off with them. Every one of the people buying these sets was an adult and there wasn't a kid in sight. The sad part is it's not the one-time limited-edition purchaser that keeps Kalmbach Publishing, Walthers and model manufacturers alive, it's the people such as us who used to build layouts but can no longer afford to do it.

But it isn't just model trains and the same has occurred with pianos and other what were once affordable hobbies or vocations.

In the 1970s you could buy a refurbished Steinway Model D concert grand for $4,500. Today, a refurbished Model D starts at $57,000. (A new D costs $220K) The price of Steinway grand out performed not because people who played them wanted them, but because of the name and the fact that it's that brand that people want. Many of these grands, including the smaller Model A and Model B grands end up in living rooms in front of a picture window and are played maybe twice a year during holidays and then maybe in between by one of the kids taking lessons for about a year. The people buying these grand pianos are stockbrokers and investors, lawyers, and doctors and not concert pianists and music students. Sadly, the pianos were bought only for showing off and nothing else. I found this out from my piano teacher who got his Steinway D back around 1972 when we were talking about my investment in a new grand. No, I didn't get a Steinway. I have a Vogel 177 T made in Poland for Schimmel and cost me $15,000.

Where I used to live, this was pretty obvious when the NIMBYs moved in. They built huge Mc Mansions with big picture windows and all had big pianos in them with the lid up. Yeah, these are same NIMBYS who complained about the trains making noise and put pressure on the railroads to discontinue horns at the two crossings in town.
 
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wreeder said:
Back when I was real active in the 60s and early 70s, my entire room sized layout didn't cost more than $200 total.
Click to expand...
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index inflation calculator, $200 in August 1965 has the same buying power as does $1943.20 in August 2023.

And as it happens ...

Right this very moment I'm taking a break from working on another Trainz adaptation of a Model Railroader/Kalmbach Books trackplan; plan 82 from the classic 101 Track Plans.

My favorites in 101 Track Plans book are:
55, Belfast & Moosehead Lake, a 3 wall shelf layout, two terminals with turntables. (my all time most favorite track plan)
(have Belfast end of it in HO in the other room)
10, Pittsburg and Ironton, a 3x6 table with a horseshoe shaped mainline, with yard and switching. (eminently suitable for building in the 3D world split in to an L shelf)

My favorites in 101 More Track Plans are:
62, Santa Fe San Jacinto District, a 4 wall shelf layout based on orange growing. (my other all time most favorite track plan) Also includes station at Perris, California, which is now a RR museum.
Plan was in the 1st Model Railroader magazine I ever bought, February 1980.

Also rather like several other 3 wall and 2 wall shelf layouts in there.

A third Very Favorite track plan from Atlas in the track plan books they used to publish is an L shaped shelf layout for switching.
It is labeled Track Plan 205 in the 1957, 1970 book, Custom Line Layouts HO scale Railroads.
Have several versions of it going in Trainz.
All making use of greater real estate area available in electrons than in subsidized apartments.

Another favorite in there is Track Plan 208, Grade Crossing Deluxe, a bent waterwings plan with a complex interchange arrangement in the middle.
Have built a couple versions of it, with extended ends for much longer run.

Smaller switching oriented layouts have always appealed to me. Why? Unknown; I've not bothered to self-analyze that much. But they are a size I can maintain in real life with my always messy health. A thing which to a degree holds true here in Trainz where they are of a scale I can readily build, landscape, and operate.

Trainz also offers opportunity to build longer, far longer, routes suitable for mainline passenger trains such as classic US streamliners, with miles between stops.
Which is also a thing I really enjoy.

👉 Guess one could say that switching industries and running passenger trains are my 2 favorite Trainz things.
Right after that is making little scenes in towns and landscaping.

Somehow I've ended up with 2 copies of TANE, one via the manufacturer and one via Steam.
The Steam one I've made more narrow gauge oriented & currently have several 600mm, 2ft, gauge layouts going. One based on that plan 55 and one quite large with about 5 miles between towns.

Am currently making some 600mm gauge 'town modules' of 2 or 3 boards each, based on track plans in various model and prototype books.
Ultimate goal is to merge them in to large layout/route with 5 to 10 miles between towns.

Have some engine terminal plans in books by both Kalmbach and Carstens Publications in New Jersey (now gone, they did Railroad Model Craftsman, which ;last I heard is now published by a company here in Missouri)

As well as small branch line and switching layouts I've got a thing for turntables and roundhouses.
(and if the US locomotive's smokestack goes through the wall over the door of the really cool British roundhouse with all the skylights, I'm okay with that, after all, it's only electrons, not styrene, brass, white metal, basswood, or the like) :unsure::ROFLMAO:

Well, didn't intend to write much of anything here today, let alone this much. But, hey, here it is.
 
Just got done laying track for Plan 12 from 101 More Track Plans in T:ANE.
Plan is named "Milwaukee Road Kingsbury Branch", a 2x11 foot shelf layout featured in Model Railroader April 1975 as a Railroad You Can Model and is presented in N scale. It features industrial switching on the Milwaukee Road in Chicago.

What I did:

Figuring it would take one baseboard using HO scale I called each 1 foot square on N scale printed plan 2 feet in HO scale since its 1/87 is roughly twice N scale's 1/160.

Maybe it isn't the most efficient, but it is a process which works for me:

Used ruler function to lay out an approximate grid adjusted a bit to work on even numbers of grid squares, 6x6 making a block just a hair over 2 ft square.

Turned out that for the turnouts/switches/points to work properly in Trainz the drawn plan needed to be stretched a bit in the middle where a lot of turnouts are crowded.
Especially that row of 3 which curve off diagonal track.

So, instead of merely doubling N scale 11 feet long to 22 feet long in HO, it came out 26 feet long in HO to look and function desirably.
Therefore, ran a bit in to a second baseboard at right hand end of printed plan.
I worked from left to right laying track.

My intent is to use it as a module to insert in to larger routes, or, to add a yard and enjoy switching on it itself.

Oriented it North-South because there is a route I want to attach to right now which requires that direction for the location.

Dunno what I'm gonna do yet for the industries.

 
Another one much enjoyed is 101 Track Plans plan 10, a 3ft by 6ft named Pittsburgh, Midvale & Ironton.

Have used it as an element in several layouts, often sliced in to an L shelf style which in real life would have yard on a 1ft wide panel and industries on a 2ft wide panel.

 
Here's result of joining 101 plan 10 and 101 plan 12 in their as printed orientations where they are on page 10.

Flipping 10 top for bottom, and offsetting it 1 foot down instead of 1 foot above might also be a thing to do.
That would make one yard.

 
I like your little modules.

I built the Scenic and Relaxed back in TS12 using Basemaps and images. I centered the image in the middle of 4-baseboards and then squished down the extra to create a floor. This was long before the idea came out for Trainz Model Railway and all the content that followed. The S&R is layout No. 8 of 9 layouts in the Nine N-Scale Model Railroad Layouts book by Atlas and I not only built this layout in real N-gauge but also in virtual. I showed the TS12 rendition of the layout to Atlas guys and they were amazed. I was surprised they didn't know anything about Trainz but then againm they may have, and ignored the software.
 
JCitron said:
I was surprised they didn't know anything about Trainz but then againm they may have, and ignored the software.
Click to expand...
First, Thanks!

Then, doesn't Atlas have their own layout track planning software for their various track products; they could have been focused on that instead of other styles of railway simulator; I dunno, just pondering.

I know of the base maps thing but have never used it. My health is a bit of a mess and simpler, meaning the less involvement and managing of technology, is better.
Also a factor is that I've downloaded a few routes which said they were done directly from a plan of the real world track & the turnouts/switches/points were all, and I literally mean 'all' presented with extremely sharp curvature.
For instance,

When the midpoint of the car side goes down the center of curved track & the corners of the trucks/bogies swing well out in to daylight, that curve is too sharp, such as below, unless you are doing trollies and trams; and the below is even with British rolling stock which is a bit shorter than say an Amtrak Superliner and FP45;
I tried it with that combo and the loco got stuck on the curve, it was leading unlike below, loco just stopped, wouldn't even back out of it.

 
The plans in the 101 Track Plans book, which I have also, are not meant to be followed literally the way we do it in Trainz. A modeler building a real layout would be following the plan but instead making adjustments and fit the parts in on his own besides, I think there's a bit of artist's license in there for some of the plans.

We do have an issue now with trains binding on tight curves that never existed before due to changes in the program. The radius has to be wider now than it was. There's a recent discussion on this subject under the Plus beta section of the TRS22 forum. The thing is, even if the tight curves worked, it doesn't mean we should use them. I mean, having trains hang over the rails like toys isn't very realistic. Even in model railroads, curves that tight, will cause problems with rolling stock binding on the rails and derailing, or derailing from binding between the coaches. In Trainz, on really tight curves, we can see couplers move apart and coaches clip corners of nearby coupled trains even before the engines get stuck.

When I presented this to ATLAS, I showed them the 3d view of the Trainz route and how I also ran into the same shortcomings mentioned in the book in the same locations on the virtual view of the layout. As you said, they were more interested in their own plan-making software which is clumsy to use too., or perhaps were seeing Trainz as a competitor to their physical products.

The basemap assets are pretty simple things to use.

The original basemap assets which I used are 720 x 720 flat plains that you place scanned images sized to fit by editing the basemap assets. If the plan is larger, you cut it up into 720 x 720 squares and then in the Trainz route, you place these basemap objects and use them as a guide like blueprint pasted on the tabletop. With the ability to lock these on layers today it makes it a lot easier than the old days when the basemap objects would move or end up being deleted by mistake.

Mike Jenkins, aka ModelerMJ wrote a program that's downloadable from his website called Basemapz. What this does is import route images and PDFs and fit them across the number of baseboards needed to make the plan fit based on the dimensions. The issues I've run into this, again I think is due to the artistic license used on the originals, is the space between aisleways and routes is not scaled properly on the drawings. In some routes I imported, the aisles were so close that not even a young child could fit. After discovering this issue, I ended up making the route larger than the original plan to accommodate people standing alongside the routes.
 
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on30gn15 said:
Just got done laying track for Plan 12 from 101 More Track Plans in T:ANE.
Plan is named "Milwaukee Road Kingsbury Branch", a 2x11 foot shelf layout featured in Model Railroader April 1975 as a Railroad You Can Model and is presented in N scale. It features industrial switching on the Milwaukee Road in Chicago.

What I did:

Figuring it would take one baseboard using HO scale I called each 1 foot square on N scale printed plan 2 feet in HO scale since its 1/87 is roughly twice N scale's 1/160.

Maybe it isn't the most efficient, but it is a process which works for me:

Used ruler function to lay out an approximate grid adjusted a bit to work on even numbers of grid squares, 6x6 making a block just a hair over 2 ft square.

Turned out that for the turnouts/switches/points to work properly in Trainz the drawn plan needed to be stretched a bit in the middle where a lot of turnouts are crowded.
Especially that row of 3 which curve off diagonal track.

So, instead of merely doubling N scale 11 feet long to 22 feet long in HO, it came out 26 feet long in HO to look and function desirably.
Therefore, ran a bit in to a second baseboard at right hand end of printed plan.
I worked from left to right laying track.

My intent is to use it as a module to insert in to larger routes, or, to add a yard and enjoy switching on it itself.

Oriented it North-South because there is a route I want to attach to right now which requires that direction for the location.

Dunno what I'm gonna do yet for the industries.

Click to expand...

This is a plan I built up a couple of years ago. I have also modeled all of the buildings to match the original, except the Montgomery Ward. I ended up modeling one built on a long rectangular footprint, built in brick, two stories tall. More like what would have existed before the larger building was built. I also have semi trailers and box trucks modeled with the M-Ward and Emmerich livery, and a few others. Maybe a few other scenery items I can't think of at the moment.

.
The original layout I lost in a harddrive crash. It's still on that drive, but I can't get to the data. I'll lay out the track the way I had it, to plan scale. It all worked, even the turnouts that are close together.
I'll take some screens sometime this week and post

@etozorak was also working on this plan, not sure if he has finished his version or not.


Rico
 
JCitron said:
The plans in the 101 Track Plans book, which I have also, are not meant to be followed literally the way we do it in Trainz. A modeler building a real layout would be following the plan but instead making adjustments and fit the parts in on his own besides, I think there's a bit of artist's license in there for some of the plans.
Click to expand...
All good points.

When I use printed plans to build routes to operate on I generally work with route set to real world scale & metric dimensions since the numbers are simpler, and lay track by eye following the pattern of the printed plan more than the specific dimensions.
 
on30gn15 said:
All good points.

When I use printed plans to build routes to operate on I generally work with route set to real world scale & metric dimensions since the numbers are simpler, and lay track by eye following the pattern of the printed plan more than the specific dimensions.
Click to expand...
That's exactly my method as well. The automatic Basemapz program took me a few tries to get the right size then I lay the track on the locked baseboards with images on them as if they're printed plans pasted down on the plywood top.
 
The basemap method is a thing I've not yet done and probably won't get around to trying.

And in other news, although that 101 Track Plans number 55 is a smaller plan, a shelf layout for 3 walls of a 9ft by 12ft room, & the topic here is small layout plans,
it is fun to sometimes stretch a plan in Trainz by adding distance between stations/towns.

Have a few variations where that plan 55 is stretched to as much as 30 miles long.
Variations because, "Well, what if that was done this way this time?" or, "How about if ..."

(and, no, there is no ruler line grid laid out on them like the tiny layouts pictured, too much work to do that on any but the smallest layouts, way way way too much work!)

Not one of them is yet fully finished - that reflects on a nice thing about small plans, you don't have to spend hours and hours and hours landscaping miles and miles and miles of route!
 
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