Hello all! Long time reader and rarely posting member toy4x4 here. I have the wife's permission (biggest hurdle) to start a new project. I don't like sitting alone in the one upstairs room I have so I proposed a new layout to the wife, that she bought off on, for the downstairs. It will be a shelf around the top of my home office about 7' off the ground. The office is 12'x12' and I work from home so it is used daily. This will allow me to enjoy my trains and be much more used seeing how I would not be upstairs by myself. I will be putting a HO track around the room to run my On30 trains on (topic for a different forum) and have decided to put a lower shelf that will have the Z scale train on. I will be hooking up the Digitrax system to both and just want a long Z scale trains running around the room. Most of my focus to start will be on the Z scale scenery. All I plan right now it to paint a background and then move to the On30 part. So to start, I have ordered the Rokuhan sectional track, AZL UP GP38-2 loco and the Digitrax decoder. My only concern in this is track cleaning at that height, but I will figure that out. Anyway, just glad to be here with a new project and challenge!
My Frau kind of suggested I run a shelf layout around the living room too, but I have these monster windows and weird electrical heaters. Myself I think that would be kind of hard to see and maintain. It would be cool to run long trains though.
Welcome to Z scale. Regarding track cleaning, I recently acquired an Aztec track cleaning boxcar. Works well for me and I think it might work for you. Mark
Thanks for the recommendation. I was looking at those earlier today. Will probably pick one up before I start putting the track on.
My suggestion to run your trains everyday. If you run it everyday, it doesn't develop oxidation. The problem develops when you don't run trains for a while. Its almost like a coating develops around the rail and requires a complete cleaning to get the engine to run again.
