BLURR Portable Model Railroad

. . . . . . Someone should do a styrofoam scenery modeling clinic with it. I don't have time to improve it.

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I hauled it out of the garage and set it up for pictures today (May 2011). (Gee whiz, it still doesn't look like much after 20 years.) I just set it on a picnic table. It doesn't have it's own legs. The round circle in the middle is a picture board with railroad-y old calendar pictures. It was easier to use pictures than finish the scenery. It's made of thin plywood, can be hauled flat, and rolls into a circle. It's easy to haul and acts like a view blocker to hide how small this railroad really is.

I did it in HO-scale because all my equipment is HO. I could have saved lots of space and size if I did it in N-scale. I considered just building a circle of track, but that doesn't allow much space for a train. The engine could be within inches of the caboose. So I planned it a few inches bigger and went with an over-and-under layout. It has the full 22-foot scale clearance to allow hi-cubes and double-stack container trains. But it also has 4% grades. It's not that much of a hill climb when running long trains, because part of the train is coasting down while the other part is going up. Just don't expect an 0-4-0 to push a 200-ton crane up that grade. Modern locomotives and transistor power packs have good speed control and don't need constant adjustment to keep a steady speed. The only thing that makes it bearable to watch long cars go around an 18-inch radius track is that the train never leaves a curve. The car's corner overhang is there, but it is consistent and never changes. So the train looks smooth going around. . . . . . and around. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and around. With the over-and-under, I can run over 25 cars in HO-scale and yet it looks like the engine is a long way from the caboose. Although, in one place, the conductor in the caboose could hand a lunch pail to the engineer on the other track. What's that you say about cabooses? Have you ever been asked at a model railroad show, . . . . . . 'my train set has a caboose, but I don't know how to use it. I've never seen one on a real railroad.' This view of the over-under needs a bridge plate and trestle supports for realism. Or a viaduct, but the track angle doesn't suit concrete arches. Any scenery that I would ever install should be fast to set up, and break-resistant.

The only scenery in 20 years is some paint (and not enough of that) and this piece of plaster block wall from a friend. And I made a red ribbed steel retaining wall (which has just one section so far). It is simulated by the corrugated interior of light-bulb cardboard boxes. It was easy and cheap (ask my friends about that). The wall was a proper model engineering method to scenic the close vertical edge between tracks.

Besides the over-and-under, there is a passing siding and a spur. Comparing the view below with the first picture at the top of this page, I must have squeezed in the passing siding after I first built it. It's mostly 18-inch minimum radius, and 15-inch on the spur to get inside the circle. I wired it for 4 blocks with an Atlas Selector switch (this was long before DCC was around). The whole layout is 43 x 46 inches.

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The bottom of the layout is just wood blocks
and cookie-cutter scraps of 7/16-inch plywood.

I didn't weigh it, but it feels like it's under 20 lbs.

It is still fairly rigid, compared to a flat piece of wood.

To help me haul it by myself up steps and down long hallways of schools, I added this wooden shoulder rest.

Here's the Union part of the railroad. One spur heads off the corner of the layout. It can connect to other modules that can have switching or whatever.

This year, I also have an un-used module. (the rest are built almost permanently into my basement model railroad) I could put this small yard module on the spur. It's 1 x 4 foot and framed in 1 x 4 lumber.

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Link back to my index page, Bruce's RailRoad Pictures

( the index page is now on the TrainWeb site, as of January 2011. And I will have to also keep the Next Generation index up-to-date also )
This page wrote in May 2011