Chapter 1 - 12/03/2006

G’day All,

Welcome to the first installment of Adam’s Layout. Over the next little while, I will be updating this section regularly with blow by blow accounts of how I am building my own layout. Many of you who I have had the privilege of meeting in the past have heard the tall stories of the large Queensland layout I intend to build. Well here it is step by step.

Design Requirements:
My personal layout has been designed around four key factors,

1.
 It must run full length trains (generally 39-45 wagons) with a scale amount of locomotives.
2.
 The layout is to be based on the Western Line in the Dalby region. Using Dalby as the main station and another smaller passing loop fitted with a grain silo.
3.
 The layout must be DCC and have hidden staging areas for up to eight full size trains to be stowed without interfering with the running of the layout.
4.
 The layout is to be modeled around 1995 to allow a mixture of locomotive liveries and wagon types.

The first requirement of this layout was always going to be the most interesting, how can you get two HO scale locomotives to pull a train that is 7.5 meters (25 feet) long? The answer to this first major problem was to fit the locomotives with pewter underframes. After looking into doing this for my own models, it was decided to incorporate this feature into our locomotive kits (I’m sure I can’t be the only one mad enough to try and run trains this long).

 After having extensive conversations with Paul Blake about his series of exhibition layouts, I learned that it would be pointless contemplating any curves tighter than 3’6” radius. As this would lead to very poor running, especially considering the length of the trains.
After having purchased a property at Jandowae, I was essentially left with a large enough room to build my layout. According to my wife there is a rather nice house above this train room also which can be considered an added bonus.
Overall the room measures 7.7 meters wide and 7 meters deep. Attached to the back of this room is a garage of around 3.9 meters depth… So after convincing my darling wife that it would make a monumental increase to the value of the house for me to remove the wall between these two rooms we were left with a room measuring 9.7 meters deep and 7.7 meters wide.

The next problem is that in this room somewhere had to be built a separate modeling room, so as to allow myself to be separated from the human race completely.

As a point, the need for this room was discovered after a visit from the dreaded mother in-law and discovering that whilst you are engrossed in trying to make patterns for new kits it is less than ideal to have your Polish mother in-law barge into the room and ask (in an elevated voice) “Adam have you had breakfast”… The result of which was a passenger car side that now looked as though it had been the victim of a horrific accident and a couple of fingers that appeared to be leaking a red substance from them.

After being informed that I was unable to surround the perimeter of the room with anti-mother in-law mines, it was decided that the modeling room would have to be separate from the rest of the house and would preferably require a team of expert cartographers to locate.

The first Project was to build the walls for the modeling room. This I am glad to say went along without a hitch. The result is that now I have a large room dedicated exclusively to building model trains… and the washing machine (some concessions needed to be made during the bargaining process).

The next step was to build the modeling bench and shelves, this again came together without too much trouble (despite my best efforts to the contrary). 

The next step is to build the second wall and tear down part of the garage wall, followed by removal of 4 windows from the soon to be layout room. 

We shall see how we go.