Planning On Paper

Sketching out the track plan

Downsizing is an exercise in compromise. Whether it’s personal belongings or our model railroads, downsizing means a bunch of stuff must go!

As I was dismantling my basement-sized layout last year - packing and storing locomotives, rolling stock, buildings, scenery, track and rail - it really hit me. I realized that 80 percent of this stuff I was storing away wasn’t going to fit in my new layout space. Reality check. But, with that said, I have chosen to embrace the new smaller scope of my hobby in our new little cabin.

I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but the large layout was stressing me out. Because I did not have endless amounts of time and money to put into the railroad, it caused a huge mental block for me. And, that caused me to have a lot of guilt. I had all this space in our home for my hobby and I wasn’t fully taking advantage of it. 

When my wife and I decided to put our large vintage home up for sale, the Mosquito Creek Lumber Co. layout was about 45-percent complete. There were areas with finished hand-laid track and scenery, and I took full advantage of those couple spots for photography for social media and magazine article stories. 

It was a blessing in disguise when the wrecking ball came down and the layout systematically turned to a large pile of scrap. With every load of demolished benchwork I hauled to the building materials recycling yard, my way of looking at model railroading shifted. I was looking forward to a smaller layout. I began to see the new project as something that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time. 

With the smaller plan, I needed less supplies, less track, less locos, less freight cars and all the other stuff that a bigger layout calls for. Yes, I lost several areas of my old layout that I dearly loved and had grandiose plans for. But my new, focused approach to the smaller layout sparked my love for the hobby once again.

I sketched and sketched and sketched again track plan after track plan. I measured the future “train room,” measured and remeasured until I felt good about what was going to fit the space and that all operational possibilities were mapped out. (I’ll address the operations I have plans for with this new layout in a future blog post.) Above is one of the early track plan sketches. Wishful thinking!

It’s amazing how much layout you “think” will fit in the given space when sketched on paper! It wasn’t until I started to build and mount the benchwork framing to the walls that I got another rude awakening. With a 3-foot section of HO scale flex track and a couple of turnouts, I began to position the track on the framework. I bent the track for curves and placed the switches. It was at that point I realized most of the pencil lines on my graph paper track plans, all the track was going wasn’t going fit on the new layout. Below is another revised track plan for the space. But even this trimmed down sketch did not reflect what would actually fit in the space!

I must have gone through several pencils and erasers as I deleted logging spurs over here and the small woods yard over there. The track plan might have worked in N scale, but in On30; No way! I eventually whittled the track plan down into what was hopefully going to fit and crossed my fingers it would leave enough room for some small structures and scenery.

I hope you can see the progression of my pencil sketched track plans from the hat I hoped I could fit to the harsh reality of what the confined space of the two walls in the space bedroom would allow.  On left is a conceptual drawing of the limited number of buildings that might fit in the space of the logging camp.

The current plan for the little shelf layout is a far cry from those first few track plan sketches. But I’m going to make this new, streamlined plan work!

 Above is the current track plan for the 'Mosquito Camp' side of the layout I'm working from.