How to pack a train set

This is my how to guide to packing my train set into a reasonably sized box.

 First, an idea of the basic dimensions of the box that I use:

Start with a smooth flat layer of bridge supports.

carefully top with straight pieces

Make sure to connect the pieces to save space

Continue stacking the straight pieces

Then we carefully place the bridges in the open corner.

add the elevated tracks on the long straights (sideways helps control space)

the small pieces work great in the last open corner

and the curve created by the bridge pieces

shorter straights can be nicely placed in the holes created by the bridges

then we load the V-splits and start placing stacks of curves

Some stacks go flat, while some are placed sideways

The red bridge holds a few pieces and two tunnels fit nicely into the curve space

carefully wedge the other two tunnels into place and...

randomly place the cars any little place they go and...

TADA! it is all packed up.

 Now you know the fun I have in cleaning up after the tracks have been traversed and photographed.  Of course, now I have a new piece to work into the mix, but you will just have to wait a few weeks to see what I got for Christmas.  I will say that I am pretty excited about this addition.

Conductor Crim

Two new layouts

  I have a little something new for this post, but we will get to that with the second layout.  First, I returned to the basic cloverleaf for this one, but attempted to add a few twists to the idea.

The idea here was to create the cloverleaf and have the track split to go over and under the cross track.  Simply enough.  The twist was going to be creating a cross over through the middle of the cloverleaf involving the ground level paths.  Unfortunately the bridge supports made that an impossibility.  I may have to revisit this idea and put the elevated path outside the ground level, thus removing the bridge supports as an obstacle to my design.  Anyway, with the middle crossover not working, it was time to head in a different direction.

So if crossing the tracks in the middle didn't work, then I would have to create reversing routes along the outside part of the cloverleaf.  The first route was pretty easy.  The second route took a lot more planning.

When I do create these layouts, they tend to dominate the living room and inevitably disaster is bound to strike.  This particular disaster (the wife tornado) only caused minor damage.

 Oh well, easily repaired.  And on the the next layout and something not seen in previous layouts...


...SCENERY.  Yes, that's right layouts now have scenery.  First we have:

The White House - LEGO Architecture edition.  I have always loved LEGO's and so being able to add LEGO structures to the layout makes everything even more enjoyable.  The White House is not the only LEGO Architecture piece to join the party.  I also added the Willis (Sears) Tower

Since it is in Chicago, it had to go next to the elevated section of this layout.  This layout is based on placing two sets of splits at right angles to each other and then running the tracks over and around each other to bring them back.

A good view of the splits that started this design

So that's it for now but there is more coming soon.  Look for a post about how to nicely place all these pieces into a box for easy storage.

Conductor Crim

Friends with Trains

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to visit some friends from college for the weekend.  They had a three year old son who loves trains.  So Saturday morning we took some time to play with trains.  The design wasn't the biggest deal.  It was more fun to run our trains around the track and occasionally crash into each other and have a nice wreck.

Kyper busily driving his train around our layout

Looking rather pleased with the layout

The suspension bridge over two tracks

The long straightaway coming out of the crossover.

Some small creativity, stacking on engine on top of the other.

As you can see, we had fun with the trains that morning.  Look for more creative designs from my own collection coming soon and a short bit on how to pack all this stuff up nice and neat.

THE BIG LAYOUT

I know I have been talking about it for awhile now and here it is - the Big layout with every piece that I currently own used in the design.  It was quite a challenge so I thought that I would photo document the process so that you can see how the layout evolved and how I got to the final creation.  To start, I used the figure 8 with oval:

I decided to use the intersection here instead of a bridge through the middle so that I could use the bridges for other uses like going over the figure 8:

As I was thinking through the layout, I was debating between creating largely independent layouts on either side of the figure 8 and connecting them with a single lane or making it one fully integrated layout.  Eventually I decided to go with the fully integrated layout.  Now it was a matter  of figuring out where to go with that idea.  Originally I thought about two bridges running parallel to the current bridge, but that presented a few too many issues so I switched to a longer bridge running perpendicular to the current bridge.  The short bridge actually goes up two levels and the long bridge actually goes over the curves, back down and the up over the middle and under the short bridge:

I spent a lot of time deciding which way to take the curve on the right end of the bridge and eventually settled on the right turn instead of the left curve as shown above.  The next step was connecting  one end of the short bridge to one end of the long bridge.  I decided to work on the left side of the layout and originally went with a loop that splits, crosses itself and then came back together:

This eventually changed, but more on that later.  The next development was a bridge crossing over the oval and the long bridge (hence the reason I didn't leave it up across the entire length):

Originally I simply connected the right side of this bridge to the long bridge at the top of the above photo.  This left me with two simply loops on that side of the figure 8 and so I decided that I could one of my splits and switch it so that the loops actually interact with each other:

Much more interesting, don't you think.  At this point, it was time to move to the other side of the figure 8 and work that side.  I still had a pair of splits left and several bridges so there was some serious creativity required.  The first part was a track that looped over itself:

At this point, my creativity started to suffer as I had a huge amount of curves left and very few straight pieces, not to mention that last set of splits.  Eventually I did manage to make it work:

I still had a few ideas with the split and bridges going across other tracks.  Throw in a few chicanes to eat up some curves and we had a complete layout.  Due to the size, it was hard to capture the entire track in one photo, but here it is:

So there it is in all of it's large massive glory - what do you think?  Leave your comments below.