Island layouts

[steinjr]

a pretty big island layout. I'm thinking 7 foot wide x 60 long with a backdrop down the center. I may be dreaming here, but I have the room so why not?

Why a seven foot wide island might not be totally optimal ? Perhaps because it can be pretty hard to work on stuff that is 3 1/2 feet away from the edge without either crushing things that are closer to the edge, crawling under the layout and popping your head out a an access hole or dangling from some kind of overhead contraption.

With Murphy being the realist what he was, it is in those kinds of situations (when it is very hard to access something) that I often find that I have forgotten some tool I will need, so I have to crawl back out again to get the tool, swearing in a couple of different languages both coming out again and going in again (and even more so for the second or third time)

If I had a space that was 14 by 70 feet, I think I probably would have considered doing something like this:



Ie combining an island/peninsula down the center of the room with shelves along the two long sides. Advantage is better reach (nothing is further than about 2 feet away from an aisle), and room for a more (and more visually separated) scenes along the track, a longer mainline without having to loop back through the same scene - you get about 280-300 feet of run length down one wall, up the peninsula, around the lobe at the end of the peninsula, down other end of peninsula and then up the other wall, before curving around at the end of the room to go back to the first wall again.

Disadvantage ? You have to make some kind of swing gate/lift-up/lift-out or duck-under at the point where you need to move into the layout, and you have to decide what to do with the windows high up on your southern wall - whether to leave them as-is, have roll down curtains with sky painted on the backside or some other solution.

Anyways - just a suggestion - if you want to do a seven foot wide island, then by all means do a seven foot wide island - it is your space and your layout - I am just pointing out that it is not a case of either a layout that just runs along the walls or just stands in the center of the floor, but it is quite possible to mix and match and combine the two styles when there is room for that

Edit: I didn't mention this, but lets make it explicit: longer and narrower benchwork is probably better suited for scenes where each train pass through each scene once during a round of the layout - which is the case for the overwhelming majority of real life railroad scenes, including mountain scenes.

But equally obvious: wider benchwork would probably be more suited if you desire to make a scene where a trains loop over and around itself and meanders through a scene from many directions as part of it's ascent or descent of the mountain, popping in and out of tunnels and across bridges.

Which is just yet another way of saying "there is no 'one size fits all' in layout design". Around-the-wall style is good in some circumstances, freestanding middle-of-floor is good under some circumstances, combinations of the two are good under some circumstances. No single style is always good or always bad.

Grin,
Stein