Building A Home Layout

After attending model railroad shows and many trips to the local hobby shops, most of us desire to build a home layout of some kind.

The home layout will typically begin as a 4′ x 8′ piece of plywood painted green with some track put down in a circle in order that we can watch our trains go round and round. Normally after just a short period of time, we feel like something is missing and start experimenting with some sort of scenery on our layout.

About the same time that all of this takes place, we typically begin in our quest to find some help and resort to the magazine realm to find it. Over the years, I have found Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsmen to be invaluable sources of information and training. We find that we read the magazines from cover to cover in just a couple of days gleaning all that we can. We then go back to our little layouts and attempt to put into practice that which we have read about.

We continue to read and soon discover articles that talk about clubs and we quickly realize that there may actually be some other people out there that still play with trains like us. We begin our search for people of like minds and start to hang out with them. We quickly soak up new information like a sponge and before long, our little layout soon becomes a little masterpiece! The only problem is that we now want a bigger and better layout.

In my own situation, I was modeling in “N” Scale and started with a 4′ x 4′ piece of plywood with homosote on top and built my first layout on it. After getting married and space becoming more of an issue, I graduated to a 3′ x 6’8″ hollow core interior door. Over the years, I experimented with different scales and sizes of layouts, but always came back to N scale and finally built an around-the-garage layout that translated into a 10′ x 20′ N scale layout. I thought that this would be my final and dream layout, only to have a move 2 years later shatter those dreams. When we moved, we moved to the mountains of north Georgia and eventually bought a small farm. Located on the farm was a second house that been abandoned for about 15 years. I decided this would make a good layout room–or rather layout house.

I was excited to get started, so after some repairs to the house, I started digging the “N” Scale stuff out of the boxes and very quickly discovered that my age had finally caught up with me and that I could no longer see good enough to run “N” Scale. Thank goodness for Ebay!

Now that I was getting a chance to start all over again, I figured that I would do it right and build a nice around the wall – double decker “HO” Scale layout controlled by DCC in the living room… or  living room and dining room… or living room, dining room and enclosed front porch. One thing for sure, is that if you have the room, the layout will magically grow!

Over the years, one thing that I have discovered is that you will never ever be completely finished with your layout(s).

Below are some of the pictures that I have taken during the process of building this last layout. Enjoy!