Hi all. You got all the bench work done. What's the best place to start the layout? Main line,yards,theme of railroad,or setting the track code,then deciding the forementioned? thanks all Booyak.

A plan. You need to have at least have some kind of layout in mind before you start putting wood shavings on the floor. You have to don't have everything planned to the last screw but a basic idea will save you lots of heartaches, and extra money, down the road. either draw a layout of your own design or get one of the trackage programs put out by the track makers and don't be shy about changing your mind, so that when you're ready to start building you'll have a firm plan in mind that you're willing to stay with.

Agreed. You need to have some idea of what your going to build. But when I did start, I started at the yard with the main line and some switches. That way I could do some switching and car testing in between track laying.

Bruce

I agree with the plan and yards. With my plan I knew, to keep me motivated, I wanted to build the yards first to I could play while continuing work. The idea was to build the area in green from these plans middle pix.

Now I can run trains and switch while working on buildings and extending the layout.

I started with a storage yard for the reasons mentioned above. I'd also consider whether there is any place where the trackwork might be questionable because if you can't make a particular area work out then it might effect adjoining parts of the layout. That area for me happened to be at the throat of my storage yard anyway.

At the time I started my layout, I still had a lot of 3 rail track, laying around, some flexible and some broad curves. I started by trying my basic track plan on the floor and on some basic bench work. Any of the bench work that I had already started, had to be modified substantially. I used the 3 rail track to mark up the plywood for my sub roadbed. and bench top, then built the rest of the bench work, to fit the pieces that I had cut from the plywood. My layout is in two rooms. In the second room, I made up the sub roadbed by laminating 1/2" by 1 1/2" strips of particle board. This made beautiful sub roadbed, with very realistic tangent curves and is very strong (kind of like this |||||| ). It only needs to be supported ever 24" or so. On my next Layout I plan to use a lot more of this method. The reason for bringing this up, is that it is easier to make most of the sub roadbed, before the support structure is built.