Having printed out full size plans helps with scale and testing actual wagons and coaches on curves but isn’t so great when you need to see the whole, overall 3D effect of the layout. To do that, a mock up is needed. I decided to build a scale version using some XPS foam I had (Bunnings sourced) to carve some 3D forms around a scaled down printout from AnyRail. I printed the tunnel mouths from a Metcalfe template, scaled down appropriately. Rough and ready mock up but it gave me a good look at the overall structure and I felt pretty happy about the left side (or station side), with…

I previously wrote that I needed to see how the plans looked printed at full scale. I did a version on the living room floor to start with. After some refinements, I landed at pretty solid plan that I felt needed to be completely laid out in the new garage space. I didn’t fancy the idea of printing and taping 100 or so A4 pages. So I decided to use my local Officeworks services to print A0 pages instead. Interestingly, the cheaper ‘Blueprint’ option works out how much ink there is in the page. That meant I had to remove a few elements in AnyRail to get it uploaded successfully.…

Once I was happy with the plan in AnyRail, I decided to see how curved it looked in ‘real life’. It’s useful to see the actual scale of the trackwork to judge to the overall effect, ratios, curves and so on. I don’t have a large printer so I needed to sellotape a lot of A4 pages to get a view. Using the Peco Finescale templates that I downloaded from their website is pretty useful. I thought they were a bit more accurate for this exercise. Later on, when the plan was more refined, I printed everything in A0. I talked about that on my other post.

After a lot of research and landing on Saddleworth, the next challenge was to plan how to fit it sensibly into the space, which I calculated to be about 1.2m x 4.8m or thereabouts. The biggest constraint was the depth. Why? I wanted a double track continuous loop so the inner loop would have the sharpest curvature, and I needed it to look relatively realistic. Minimum radii where coaches overhang the track is what I was trying to avoid. I also needed to have sufficient space in the centre of the layout to operate it. Books So, I got access via the library or actually purchased several track planning books.…

Unfortunately I don’t have a dedicated shed that I can use exclusively for a railway layout. I do have a garage that isn’t used to hold a car and, after some fitting out, was a suitable space for a layout. In order to make a layout that would fit the garage space, I needed a plan. In fact, I needed to create an accurate plan so therefore I decided I needed to be quite precise about the trackplan. That meant I needed a software package a went with AnyRail. I tried out quite a lot of different software packages, including XtrkCad and SCARM. As I am going for a relatively…