Hi there, in this video I'm going to give you a tour around my HO scale model
railway that I built in my home office space, and talk about how I operate it
and some of its design features. Now a lot of traditional layouts that you see
in model railway magazines and on the Internet are built in very traditional
model railways spaces, often dedicated layout spare rooms, or garages or perhaps
basements, but the reality for most people out there is that they don't have
an entire room to dedicate to a hobby. And particularly for a lot of young
people, here in Australia owning your own home is often a far-distant dream - a lot
of us are renting and don't have ideal spaces to work with so being able to
build a layout alongside 'other things' in another room is really beneficial if you
can manage it. Now it might sound a bit crazy but this layout really takes up no
space at all, because it's all built in what would otherwise be empty space on
shelf work above the computers running around the wall of the entire room. A big
advantage about this particular room is that it has a stairwell, which means that
the railway can run all around the edge of the room without having to have a
lifting gate or a removable bridge
Now as you can see I haven't added any scenery to this layout, but there's
certainly no reason why you couldn't do so on a layout of this kind of design.
For me this layout has been a bit of a proof of concept and a place to test
ideas. I've always known I won't be in this house for particularly long so it
was a good spot to try some things out. Now if you have a look at the track
plan, the main station Lorikeet is down in the bottom left-hand corner and
the line continues as a double track main line up around the north side of
the layout down to Butcherbird Junction where it splits into two branch lines
one that runs along the banister of the stairwell to a location that I've called
Bannister, and the other continues all the way around the wall to the south end
of the layout to a location called Ironbark.
And from there there is a connection back to Lorikeet again, I normally enjoy
running my trains point-to-point but if I'm running along goods train for
instance like I am at the moment, I'll often run it all the way around. If you
want to study the track plan in more detail just pause the video, otherwise
I'm going to show you around the rest of the layout. So this here is the main
station at Lorikeet, there are three platforms here, or at least you can
imagine there are three platforms there, plus an extra siding that I usually
store railmotors in. Down around the south end here
there's a goods yard where I usually store my four-wheel wagons and older
rollingstock, and there's a couple of sidings that are usually used for
layover of locomotives. Now the layout runs on straight 12 volts DC, it's
controlled by a number of these homemade control panels that I built, I've already
made a more detailed video about these so I'll put a link to that in the video
description if you'd like to have a look. Looking north from Lorikeet we have a
double track mainline, then there's an arrivals loop which is double ended, and
then two dead-end sidings which I used to store my long goods consist which is
just coming up through on the Up Main here. Around the north side of the layout
here the line crosses the window in this long double track viaduct, the edging on
this viaduct is just relatively thin balsa wood, it's not all that structural
it's just to hold rollingstock on the top if there's a minor derailment. Then
around here is Butcherbird Junction. I always imagined this would be a long
curved island platform, there's a crossover at the up end here so you can
have short running, or the down line here is actually bi-directional so you can
overtake a train here. And then on the inside of the curve here is the
Stairwell North locomotive depot, which also features the passenger car sidings
Then we've got the junction over here with the Bannister line running out
there, and the mainline heading out along the wall and over to the bookshelf
tunnel there. Here at Bannister I imagine the platform would be on the
left hand side there, then you've got a runaround loop and a single good siding
and you'll notice that access to the locomotive depot is only from here at
Bannister, so all trains have to reverse direction in the platform here to access
the locomotive depot and the car sidings. As you can see it's a very long way down
into the stairs from here. There's only ever been one derailment which was
fairly minor and sent some shipping containers over the edge but other than
that we haven't had any problems. And then here at the south end of the layout
is Ironbark platform would be on the right-hand road there which leads to a
dead end with a crossover to allow running around to train here. One thing
that I designed quite carefully, and I'm really glad that I did was to make sure
that all the platform roads here were of a standard length so he didn't end up
awkwardly overhanging onto the main line with certain consists, so platform 1
which is the track on the far right there is designed to hold four passenger
cars and one locomotive, platform 2 holds three and one locomotive and so on
and so forth. So you can make up a train elsewhere and be sure that it's going to
fit when you arrive here. There was no space for crossovers down the far end
so all trains here have to be shunted by a pilot locomotive, which actually adds a
lot of operational interest. Likewise over here at Stairwell North I made sure
that the length of train you can fit into these car sidings also fits in the
platform of Banister so that you can easily dock out there and run a train in
without being over length
The turntable itself is a great way to store a lot of locomotives in a small
space and obviously be able to turn them as well, I built it from a Walthers kit of
a US prototype and Australianised or Victorianised it quite a bit
it's still far too long to be prototypical for Victoria but I think the
overall effect is quite good. I'd say one design lesson I've definitely learned is
that really short sidings like these two in the corner here are pretty much
useless unless you've got a really specific idea of what you want to do
with them, so these two I sometimes shunt maintenance of way wagons into or
whatever, but it's kind of annoying spot to get to and usually end up just not
using them at all. An exception would be somewhere like this where I'm frequently
putting locomotives of a known length and it's actually quite useful to have a
number of short sidings. Probably the biggest lesson
that I've learnt is that wire, particularly when you're using recycled wire all sorts of different
sizes, takes up a lot of space when you build complicated control panels it's
absolutely everywhere
and when I get the opportunity to build another layout like this I'll definitely
be building some kind of cable trays or way of containing all of this because as
you can see it is completely out of hand. Now as I mentioned before, this layout
was only ever going to be a temporary thing and by the time you watch this
video, it won't exist anymore. I'm moving house in the next couple of
weeks and my job starting tomorrow is to start pulling all of this up and putting
all my rolling stock in boxes. So it's a bit of a sad time but it's also exciting
with lots of possibilities for other things I can be doing my next project
and I've certainly had a lot of fun running this layout over the probably
18 months or so that it's been fully functional