Island layouts

[steinjr]

The objective does not have to be to fill the room with layout. Your stated objective was to to fit in a layout into the room, without too badly compromising other uses of the room (access to bathroom, window, patio doors and closet). If you need access to all those doors and windows, then you pretty much need those aisles in Charlie's proposal (as in my first drawing).

But if the real objective is to totally minimize space used for aisles, then just block the all doors and windows except the hallway door, put a liftout or swing gate by the hallway door and create e.g. an around the walls layout with a central peninsula like this:

Confuscious say cutting off doorway to bathroom bad idea. Confuscious also politely point out is RENTAL and hols in walls cannot be charged off to fieldmice.

I do not, however, have any problems sacrificing the use of the window if necessary, although it is major source of natural illumination. hat I can get arund.

Then you just do the same type of planning - determine how wide aisles you need and where you need them to go, decide whether you are willing to have duckunders or lift-ups and remember that some factors are pretty much given, no matter how conservative or radical your thoughts are: the reach of human arms is fairly limited (even though you can make access holes in the layout to reach things from below or rig up some kind of ladder contraption to reach things from above the layout, at the cost of increased inconvenience in reaching things).

And you do something roughly along these lines instead:



Here I am also illustrating wider aisles - if you need wider aisles - you cannot make the central peninsula all that much wider from top to bottom anyways if you are going to be to be able to comfortably reach into it to work on things like switching, so you might as well use the space above and below for more comfortable aisles - especially if you need to carry stuff like garden furniture to and from the patio through this room.

I have also illustrated a couple of turnback curves with radius 13", which is well within the realms of doable for a mountain railroad with 1900s engines and rolling stock.

Incidentally, since you keep complaining about how other modelers are so conservative : layout design is a mix of engineering (which is a conservative discipline) and art (which is not). All engineering and no art makes a working, but dull layout. All art and no engineering makes a layout that cannot sensibly be built and operated.

It is e.g. not very hard to imagine a layout that totally fill all of the room, with just "gopher village" pop-ups to allow access for building and repairs, where you crawl on you knees on the floor under the layout on your way to the patio or the bathroom. It might not be totally practical, though

It is also not very hard to imagine a big layout that is suspended from the ceiling and can be lifted up when you are not running trains. However, it might happen that a landlord that will flip out at a small (and patched up and painted over) N scale RR tunnel size hole in the side of a walk in closet also would be somewhat perturbed at getting back a room where pulleys had been attached to the ceiling for the purpose of raising and lowering a layout. Also, the engineering of making a raise up layout that remains rigid, yet lightweight, is a little harder than making simple benchwork that remains in place.

Incidentally - it might not be a bad idea to cut one or two small holes through the lower side of the walk in closet (such holes can easily be patched up again and camoflaged by a fresh coat of paint) to put some of your layout along the back wall of your walk-in closet, in effect making the layout H-shaped.

It is also possible to do things like make your layout in sections, so one or more sections can be lifted out to access stuff you only need to access infrequently. If you e.g. only need to use the patio door very infrequently, it is possible to build sectional benchwork in front of the patio doors that can be taken down and stowed under the rest of the layout when necessary. Especially easy if the part of the layout you want to stove things under is on a shelf instead of on legs.

The trick is to find the right blend (for each of us) between the visionary and the practical.

It is not enough to just denounce conservative approaches. That's easy. The difficult part is to come up with some alternative approach that works better under some circumstances. Once you do that (if you do that), that approach will quickly become the conservative approach under those circumstances - that's how engineering works.

I hope some of the sketches I have shown you have given you a few new ideas. Even those of us (including myself ) who are firmly convinced that we almost always are outside-the-box thinkers sometimes can benefit from looking at a problem in new ways.

Grin,
Stein