Welcome to Greg's web site!

Progress & Development of Greg's Layout

The sub-menu items on the menu on the left document and detail the progress of the layout.

Basically, I envisioned the layout in several phases:

1.  Small inner loop around the grassy area in the back yard.
2.  Larger loop that at least ran to the side fences and the back wall.
3. A switch yard somewhere.
4. Some future, movable, way to go all around the house.

At this time, some ideas have been tried and discarded, and the plan changed a little bit.

The inner loop is complete. It's 10' diameter curves minimum with some 14'. It's small and curvy but it's integrated with the landscaping and I have been able to run 40 car trains on it. See the pictures in "Inner Loop" at the left.

The outer loop was something I had not completely worked out. I had a retaining wall at the back of the property to run the track on, and figured to run the track out to the edges of the property.

For a long time all the track did was parallel the inner loop next to the house, follow the south wall to the back wall and head north to stop near the property line.

The grade on the back wall is 3.4%, but long trains go up just fine (double heading, yay!) You can see this stage at the left under "Outer Loop".

Here I got stuck for a while, I thought I would go through a low planter, but the track was too visible and crossed near the fireplace where a large palm tree was blocking it's path. The track is running behind the spa, and there is a bridge here for access to the spa electrics, see "Bridges"

I came up with the idea to bore a tunnel into the planter next to the property line, and then make a "canyon" in that planter. This worked out very well, and had gentler grades and better integration with the landscaping. See "Tunnel Thru Planter".

Now the track is 21" in the air, so how to get back down to the ground and the back of the house to complete the loop?

You can see my idea about a helix to get to the ground. I mocked it up, but it was turning out to be too tight and too steep, so that only short trains could run, defeating the purpose of having a larger and longer outer loop for longer trains. You can see my experiments in "Building a Helix".

In the mean time, I developed the switch yard and it's not complete yet, but usable, you can see how I put it together. I finally got to build a Wye, and use a wye switch to boot! The Switchyard link at the left shows this.

Still not comfortable with the helix idea to complete the outer loop, I had the good fortune to have a friend visit from Georgia who looked at the situation and figured out an answer in about 5 minutes! (Of course it is the "Ace Track Inspector" R.J. DeBerg, who worked on the real railroads!)

The idea is let the track follow the North property line and then make a horseshoe curve at the gate on the North side yard, and then follow the house back East, where it reconnects to the track at the back of the house. This allows a gentle grade back to ground level, the ability to walk along the train, and should allow nice long trains.  See this in "completing the outer loop"

General construction information:

I originally put the track right on the cedar bark, and pushed it under the track to get the basic track heights.

I have replaced the bark with pea gravel from home depot. This stuff is mostly smaller than the spaces between the ties, but definitely over scale. But, being larger, it locks together well, and track leveling consists of stomping on the rail, or pouring ballast on it, and lifting the track a bit. It is working well.

Note: my personal opinion is that scale gravel is problematic, the main reason is that raindrops and people's feet are NOT 1:29 scale!

I check clearances with these cars:

1. USAT container car (with 2 containers) - my tallest car
2. Aristo Mallet (big overhang on back of cab roof)
3. USAT streamliners (very long cars)
4. Aristo Heavyweights (long, and different truck pivot points than normal)

Video of inner loop testing:

Here's a 40 car train on the inner loop, not very realistic, but a good torture test for reliability.