Snowy Soo

Winter Railroading.

Tuesday 16 April 2013

A great room-sized layout (and no, it's not mine)

I'm always on the lookout for websites that chronicle the construction of modern, room-sized HO-scale layouts. I'm particularly interested in diesel-era, point-to-point switching layouts and modules.

A few of the links on this blog (look to the right) will take you to some of the favourites I've found. Please feel free to email me with suggestions of other sites/blogs that fit this description and that I've not already linked to. The web is a big place!

Dan Gaken is building such a layout in his basement called the Huron & Eastern. He doesn't have one website or blog devoted to the project but has posted pictures on his flickr site (including a track plan) and what I hope will be the first of many video journals of the layout's progress on YouTube.

Here's the track plan, click on the image to make it bigger:

A very well-executed track plan! Can't wait to see his layout progress



First I'm impressed by how well his track plan looks compared to mine, which let's face it is a bit of a disaster.

I'm also struck by the inventiveness of this plan. Even though the shelves are fairly narrow, the plan doesn't look too crowded. The deep facia gives the layout a nice clean look, even though the layout is in the mid stages of construction. The aisles are also not crowded, a nice feature for visitors.

Having the ship and Saginaw river in the middle peninsula is a great design feature as well, it nicely incorporates the prototype. I also like how he included an interchange and managed to avoid a back-bending duck under.

Here's his YouTube video of Dan explaining what his layout is all about and some of the design elements he tried to fold into it:




Finally here's a link to his set of flickr pictures documenting the layout progress

Here's one of those flickr pictures but the YouTube video looks much more up to date.

New HO Layout Progress - Fascia Installation

If anyone out there sees other layouts projects like this one on the web, I'd love to see them. Send an email here or comment on this post.

I'm hoping my next post will be about progress on my layout. Thanks for reading.