And there it hung. Unmoved and unmoving. For months. Very slowly yet very steadily gaining weight by virtue of the dust it was accumulating.

For all of its strangeness and unconventional qualities, it would have worked. I knew for a fact it could have. I had only one unresolved issue that, in the grand scheme of things, could have been left unresolved, with virtually no impact on its operation.

You see, the layout was round. With no legs. Picture a giant doughnut suspended within a square room, filling it wall-to-wall. When idle, it hung up almost against the ceiling; in operation, it descended to whatever height was convenient. You could run it while seated on bar stools, or even easy chairs. Or, standing. The benchwork was perfectly counterbalanced. One could raise and lower it with one's pinky. Just enough open space in the center for an operator and one guest: ideally suited for a "lone wolf" modeler.
 

At this point in our story, dear reader, most of the roadbed was in place, and some of the handlaid track was laid. And yet it continued to collect dust. Not because the layout could not function without a backdrop, but because I was too proud to run trains in mid-air. Yup. That was it. Stupid, stubborn pride. Lord, deliver me from it.

Meanwhile, I'd gotten married. While my new bride did not share an interest in my hobby, she was nevertheless somewhat intrigued by it, to the point that she would occasionally ask when she might see the trains run.

One might have thought I'd have taken that as encouragement! Indeed, in hindsight I should have been ecstatic.

But nooooooooo. I was a moron.

And so, as the requests to see trains running increased, so too did my impatience, and one day the layout was relocated... from the second bedroom to the dumpster in the parking lot. That it was built from steel 2x4s and Styrofoam insulation sheets made disassembly entirely too simple and quick.

My wife's emotional response was mixed. On the one hand, she was genuinely sad to see me so easily discard many months of work; on the flip side, she now had a generous space in which to set up her own hobby: painting.

Soon her requests to see trains running morphed into laments that I seem to have forfeited my hobby altogether. But such was not the case: I was furiously making plans for a new layout, one that had the advantage of being entirely conventional, even childishly simple: L-shaped folded dogbone. Can't get much more simple and conventional than that.

My "new" tactic? Three large, heavy-duty shelf brackets topped with "benchwork" consisting of pairs of two-inch foam insulation sheets laminated together. Gravity kept the assembly in place on the shelf brackets, with just a few small sheet metal screws to keep things in place should someone or something bump into the layout. (Spoiler alert: a few decades later, I can report the layout remained perfectly intact.)

There was but one strange attribute: except for the overall size and shape of the layout, I didn't plan anything. The track plan, the arrangement of structures and scenery... all were "improvised" on the spot as the layout grew. Consequently I had the track laid and even had trains running in two weeks. My wife was awestruck. I was tickled pink: it had been years since I'd run any trains. I was seven again.

A curious consequence of developing a track plan this way is that things come together sort of backwards. Instead of making any number of track plan drafts on paper (or virtual paper or what have you) and building the layout from there, I pretty much finished principal tracklaying ad hoc, and then created a drawing from the layout by a process I dubbed photoplanning. I photographed the layout with a digital camera placed flat against the ceiling at various points, then stitched the images together; finally, I traced over the assembled "satellite" image (above) with a drawing program to create the finished plan (below).

An interesting benefit of this process is that the track plan is almost perfectly accurate. It's rare to be able to build a layout precisely according to a plan—there are almost always some deviations. This method avoids such deviations; plus, you can do it at any time, even long after a layout is "finished."

Above is a sample of one of the "satellite" image tiles.

Back < Index > Next

Copyright © 1996-2026 by David K. Smith. All Rights Reserved.