Building your own layout?

For those with or needing inspiration and encouragement.

I have everything I need to build a model railroad except time and space, and maybe some theming! The family is slowly working on the space part, and I will have time depending on how hard my college class for the quarter is. I'm not the greatest with artistic stuff, so I hope mom and sis will help with that part. I can put together buildings, but I'm not a detail person.

I hope it works out well! My biggest problem is that our lifestyle at the moment is too nomadic to invest the time and money into a layout (I'm from UK, my wife is Kenyan, we currently live in South Africa, our work keeps us mobile, and we don't yet know when and where we'll eventually settle down!).

But I have been collecting N scale equipment for many years and my intention is eventually to build an African layout, based particularly on Sudan, Kenya and South Africa. I haven't yet found any manufacturer of African profile model railway kit in N scale (although some South African stuff is available in HO) but I've been collecting bits and pieces that have an African "flavour" to them and hope that with some judicious modifications and repainting they will look the part. I've found a fair bit of US and continental European kit that fits the bill. I've also found someone who scratchbuilds South African 4E and 5E locos to order, so I've ordered a 5E from him. Of course most African railways are metre gauge or 3 foot 6 inch gauge, so to be prototypically correct I should use Z scale track, but that's a bit too radical for me and I believe that at this small scale 9mm gauge track will look realistic enough. I chose N because Africa lends itself to wide open spaces and I wouldn't have enough space to get that feel in the larger scales.

My current project is to scratchbuild a Garratt in N scale. I've obtained two Fleischmann 2-8-2s, but haven't actually started cutting them up and sticking them back together again yet. It's my first major scratchbuiilding project and I think it's a fairly challenging one! But the Garratt is an iconic African loco and I feel I must have one, especially as I have fired the real thing recently in the form of 4-8-2+2-8-4 GMAM number 4079, owned by Sandstone but currently being operated by Rovos Rail in Pretoria. I spend most of my spare time at the moment on the real thing as opposed to the models - yesterday I was firing 2-8-4 class 24 number 3664 for the heritage steam club that I belong to, Friends of the Rail.

Sounds like you've got a pretty solid plan! I like your idea of leaving plenty of room for the African landscape.

Thats what i'm looking at now, deciding what kind of layout I want, real or made up, and where am I putting it. I know its going to be HO because thats the scale most of the track and accesories I already have is. I'd like it to be a multi-level layout, but I realize I need to start small so I don't burn out. So I'm going to do a couple of small shelf layouts first, that could be a part of the non-main level of the layout.

Things I'd like in my layout: list for self while I'm thinking of things LOL. I really need to take an inventory of what I already have available, it's all stored in the basement, some hard to get to.

Turntable with engine shed
A good size yard, possibly with hump? Example Willard OH
A double main line which does some side by side and some seperate -
"You take the high road, and I'll take the low road..."
A double lane helix
At least one, maybe two streams. 3 bridges available, one being double wide.
Working accesories - push button house lights, motorized....??
Passenger train platforms

Thats just a basic list to help me start drawing plans. Does this sound too ambitious? I'm still a college student and have a long life ahead of me. My German ancesters including my grandpa lived to be 90+ :) Let me know what you think.

All of that looks great. I particularly like the working accessories - some of the best layouts I've seen are characterised not so much by the track or trains as by the accessories. They have all sorts of little self-contained scenes which attract the eye of the observer. But for the layout builder I think the operation of trains is part of the fun, so that must be interesting too. A hump-shunting yard would be very interesting, although I guess it would need a lot of space. The multi-level is a nice way of getting more action and a longer track into a small space, as long as you have enough room for the gradients.

As for the time it takes to build, there's another thread in this group about a book on model railroads as an obsession, and that refers to layouts that take 20 years or so to come to a point where they can just about be said to be finished!

Wow, you have an ambition. I too have been collecting n-scale bits and bobs for a couple decades, and have finally carved out the space to start my first layout at age 61. I am excited and petrified at the same time. Your story is inspiring. If you can overcome the obstacles of doing an n scale set in Africa, I should be able to handle the Pacific Northwest. By the way, where in England? I lived in the High Wycombe area for 3 years back in the 70's, and my first model purchase was a Hornby HO "Flying Scotsman" that has never seen a track.

I'm from London, but I have to say I have few roots there now - Africa is home. I've now left South Africa (again) and settled in Kenya (again) whilst working in Sudan - until the next change...

The best laid plans of mice and men...

On a trip to England last year which included a visit to my brother-in-law's OO scale layout, my sister popped the question to me in the blunt way that elder sisters can, "At your age how do you expect to get your fingers and your eyesight around that tiny N scale stuff?" (Like >5 klaidlaw: I'm also approaching 61).

A long discussion ensued. The main reason for N scale was space, but my wife pointed out that in the new house we are building there will be space. When my wife realised that my sister helps her husband with the scenery, she indicated that she would like to do the same with ours, but not in N scale.

So, the decision was made: scrap the N scale project and do the same thing in HO scale. My brother-in-law undertook to dispose of my N scale collection on eBay and at model railway swap meets that he attends, and we began looking at HO scale kit.

One of the immediate advantages (apart from fingers and eyesight) is that South African HO scale kit is commercially available. On a recent trip to Cape Town I bought a diesel loco, rolling stock and some accessories which are genuinely African. I have also bought a British Garratt which can be made to look African with a lot less effort that scratch-building one in N scale from a pair of German locos. There's also a wonderful array of road vehicles available in HO/OO scale. And of course the fact that my wife will take an active part in this layout.

One or two African railway fundis have asked me which track gauge I intend to use, as 12 mm track gauge (TT) in HO scale would be more accurate than 16.5 mm for metre gauge and Cape Gauge (would that be labelled HOn12 or something similar?), but I'm taking the easy way out and using 16.5 mm gauge even though it will look a bit too wide. Otherwise I would have to convert the undercarriage of all the motive power and rolling stock, which is a bridge too far for clumsy fingers and aging eyesight!

You bought a British Garratt? I'm intrigued? Of whose manufacture?

>8 RobertDay: Heljan. It's a relatively new release. It's OO, not HO, so it's slightly over-scale, but that's OK because Garratts in Africa really are huge looming beasts and I think it will give the right impression.

>7 John5918:
Probably a wise decision. I'm finding messing about with the delicate insides of N-gauge locos (and keeping everything clean enough to work properly) increasingly frustrating.

>9 John5918: Well, Garratt-wise it is the only game in town, though it's a bit short on wheels for what I think of as any sort of African Garratt, being only a 2-6-0+0-6-2. But with a judicious repaint and some added detail, it will doubtless pass muster.

Oddly enough, I was helping a friend with a trade stand at a model railway exhibition yesterday, and she had a Lima SAR bogie sugar hopper for sale. Lima SAR stuff isn't very common here in the UK - British railfans are almost as tribal as football fans and even models of prototypes from Ireland or just across the Channel in France are often seen as unbearably exotic and strange - but I have sometimes seem such stuff at big European shows such as Eurospoor in Utrecht.

>11 RobertDay: British railfans are almost as tribal as football fans

Just try being the only person in a British school who collects Trix-Express and you'll see how tribal :-)

That was me, in the seventies - I don't know what my grandmother was thinking of when she gave me the starter set. Unheard-of in Britain, incompatible with everything else, and on its way out even in Germany. (Lovely models, though, and super-robust.) If it had only been Märklin, I might still have been running the same trains forty years later...

>11 RobertDay: it's a bit short on wheels

True. I would have loved to find something akin to an East African Class 59 or a South African GMAM. But it does bear a passing resemblance to some of the older, smaller African Garratts, with square front and back ends.

An HO GMAM is commercially available as a brass kit, but I don't fancy my chances building one.