Family Room Shelf Layout [2022-Present]
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When I moved back to the USA one of my first goals was to get my HO trains that I had left behind back up and running. While I had enjoyed my Japanese N scale trains I was ready to get back into HO. To me, N scale was just too finicky and I really wanted to get all my HO Pennsy locomotives operating again. After I secured a new job, I ended up moving into a small one bedroom apartment. There really wasn't any room for a train layout. However for years I had envisioned building a shelf layout that would run around my apartment family room. Even when I was in Japan, I had considered building such a layout. But with earthquakes and the inability to screw things into the wall I settled with my small table layout.
I had several goals for my new layout. 1) It needed to be semi-permanent. I knew eventually I would leave my apartment so I wanted it to be easy to disassemble and relocate or modify. 2) I wanted really wide curves. One thing I really disliked about my 4x8 layout was the sharp 18" and 22" radius curves. I really wanted to run big steam locomotives and long passenger cars on my layout. 3) It needed to have 2 mainline tracks. It's always more fun running multiple trains. When I was looking for an apartment one of my questions was always. "Am I allowed to put up shelves?" The answer was "yes" at the place I ended up moving into. (It also had a bunch or other features that I wanted.) Thus once I had settled into my new home I began designing the layout in SCARM. To meet my goal of having wide curves for large steam locos and passenger cars I incorporated 35.5" and 33.25" radius curves into the design. I was on a bit of a tight budget so I ended up using inexpensive pine for the shelving. To keep it semi-permanent, I used Bachmann EZ track and just set it on the shelve without fastening it down. To protect my trains from tragic falls, I cut 2" strips from sheets of PET and screwed them onto the sides of the shelf. For power control, I ran a power bus along the side of the tracks on the top of the self. I connected track feeders in the corners, and attached the wiring to my Digitrax DCS 50. So I could operate my trains wirelessly I made use of the LNWI and UWT-100 throttle I acquired in Japan. | ||||