Submitted by Slambo on Mon, 08/07/2006 - 06:28
If you've got track passing through a closet or small room, try to minimize the number of rail joints, and thus the number of potential derailment locations, through the small room. Derailments will always happen at the most inopportune time, especially when this small room is in use.
Submitted by Slambo on Tue, 07/25/2006 - 05:48
Avoid positioning your backdrop images too high. If the horizon is above eye level, it won't look right to a person standing in front of the layout, and it especially won't look right when you put your camera down at track level.
Submitted by Slambo on Thu, 06/15/2006 - 05:35
Adding a backdrop to even a small layout can make the layout look a great deal larger. This scene under construction is on a 4'x6' HO scale layout. Sure, there's a lot going on here, even without the finished scenery, but in hiding part of the layout, your imagination and sense of reality make you believe that there's quite a bit more on the other side.
Submitted by Slambo on Mon, 06/05/2006 - 05:26
When you're planning your model empire, look at the places on your layout where you plan to have a lot of switching (the yards and heavy industrial areas). These are the places where your operators will congregate, so leave enough room in the aisle that they can get by each other. Sometimes it will require curving a yard around a corner, like you can see here. Believe it or not, this photo is from an operating session at a home layout.
Submitted by Slambo on Wed, 05/03/2006 - 05:58
When you start on building the scenery in your city or industrial areas, make some cardboard and paper mockups of the structures that you want to include. The mockups can help you determine if the structures you want are the right shape and size for your layout; if you use the DPM wall templates, you'll even know what you need to buy to build them.
Submitted by Slambo on Mon, 02/13/2006 - 15:31
You've decided what you want to model and you know the size of the layout location. There's one more decision yet to make, and it's one that will affect your model building purchases for quite some time. You need to decide on what scale to use in your model building.
Scale vs. Gauge
First of all, there is one important distinction to learn, and that's the difference between scale and gauge. In short, these two terms can be defined as follows:
Scale
The ratio of miniaturization of an object.
Gauge
The distance between the rails on a section of track.
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