Oftentimes, what makes a layout a pleasure to operate are nifty solutions. Here are a few I saw on Flash's layout: First up: Nice industry... Is actually used to hide an access hatch for the corner:
While proper models are being built, simple paper mockups, done on a PC and a color ink jet printer, to occupy the scene: to which we add simple paper details, either painted on... ... or actually made:
Buildings hold up the second deck. The foremost one is plastic, kitbashed from car shed kits, with an interior. The others are foam core boxes, wrapped with printed paper--they are placeholders for now. A linear accelerator for the place where two decks are converging, and vertical space is tight.
Clever! I don't have a multi-level layout, but part of the reason for that is that I wanted more stability than I expected to get with no front bracing. I'll keep this in mind.
I only have a limited space in my garage for my layout. My rollaway toolbox sits behind my yard. I rotate it 90 degrees and swing it out when I operate the layout so that I can access the aisle behind the layout. You can see the red toolbox behind the yard here. When I painted my backdrop, I painted the back of the toolbox so that there would also be a backdrop behind the yard instead of just a big red toolbox.
On a friend's layout, he only needed one support at a corner to brace is upper deck. The layout was kind of "U"shaped with a helix supporting the other end and the walls of the room providing good a good anchor for the rest. He had a threaded rod holding the one corner up, painted flat black. However it stuck out like a sore thumb. I built him a small power plant with a brick chimney that enclosed the rod.
Russ, The upper deck over the city is only one-inch foam, so I felt it needed a little more than one support. The upper deck at the other end of the layout, over the roundhouse, is supported by only one piece of quarter-inch threaded rod, hung down from the ceiling. There's about 30 inches of space between the two decks there, but they both contain turnaround loops--if they were closer together, they'd be too deep for the separation.
add a few "clouds" along the edge and around the top of your buildings and that would look slick! really like what i see here!! keep it up guys!
NTRAK being what it is, at least three lines running through a scene, we are always trying to hide two of those lines to model a single track scene. On these modules I ran the yellow and blue lines back behind a view block of trees to run along the back of the 12 foot module group. The river kind of hooks around a bend and dissapeard into the trees also. If viewed from the middle of the group, you just see the one mainline and a river bending off around a corner.
Pete.. The Rope light looks Unreal, Is it Just for illumination ?? Hemi Your Tree line does its Job really well... Clever thinking.
The rope lights help fill in light. There are also five small halogens on the underside of the deck. Most people will see neither, unless they stoop over. I won't show them in for-publication images; I showed them here so people could see the construction. The rope lights cast weak, very yellow light. They were a quick, cheap solution to lighting the depths of a multi-deck layout.
My roundhouse resides in an insufficient space: Even though there's no real effort to camouflage the fact, people don't seem to notice that the roundhouse doesn't go all the way back. The odd angles and slopes of the roundhouse, as opposed to a more conventional rectangular building, seem to fool the eye to some extent. And since the cut is on the back slope of the roof, in "ground-level" photographs it's not obvious at all:
Tad, neat paint job on that tool box, man! Russell, that module has to rank in the world's top ten, for sure!
Here's my "ship" solution for the Port of Longview. I don't have the room like Pere does, and I'm jealous of those awesome ship models on his layout. The tug in the third pic is guiding the freighter behing the warehouse down the Columbia River.
Great work on this everyone! Bill, love the way you solved your port scene problem. Hemi, I am thinking of building a new layout and your staging method is just what I'm looking for. Jeff
