Drawing by Dan De Santis

Our new layout will be a 12' x 26' rectangle made up of 16 sections. (See the definition of SECTION and MODULE). By removing sections 3 and 11, we will be able to resize our layout to 22' in length. Each section will be 3' x 4' in size and will be 42" above the floor. Sections 14,15,16 will feature a city scene, and sections 6,7,8 will feature mountains and valleys. Sections 1-5 will be scale scenery, and 9-13 will be hi-rail and contain most of the operating accessories.

Our layout will use about 600ft of American models nickel-silver code 148 flex-track, 12 turnouts from BK Enterprises and almost 1,000ft of 18ga wire.

Drawing by Dan De Santis

A cross-section of a typical section shows (from the left) the two mainlines on the lower level and the accessory track. The upper level will support a loop and a point-to-point. The right-most track will be a hidden staging track. The "ground level" will be formed using construction-grade foam board allowing some terrain-sculpting.

Not all of the sections will have four legs. Only sections 1,7,13,15 (see above) will be built with four legs, all the others will only have two. All legs will be permanently attached to the modules and will swing up under the section for transportation. All wiring will be securely fastened to the sections and will end in "pigtails" to allow the sections to be daisy-chained together using a 20-wire harness, and each section will sport its' own power-strip (also daisy-chained to its' neighbor) to allow AC power all the way around the layout.

We are discussing the relative merits of air powered versus electric powered switch machines for the turnouts (a few of the turnouts will be manual control.)

(You are here: SJSG Home -> Layouts -> New Layout  Index -> Picture02)