Design A Model Layout To Fit On A Single Bed, Voxville End TMD

Article created on 07/12/2011 by Greg Durrant

Well it has been mulling over in my head for sometime now, shall I build a New Railway Layout? Well finally I have had an idea, why don’t I build a small layout that will fit on the single bed in my Home Office. Well if I said the whole idea came from my head I would be lying, as the start of this idea came from reading this months issue of British Railway Modelling (Issue Jan 2012 Vol19 No10, Available from all good stockiest in the UK.) As there was an article on the layout ‘Langwith Road, Making the most of a small space’ and the idea was born.

Sketching The Idea

Well like with most of my designs I first sketch the idea out on Google’s SketchUp, this is so I can get a rough idea of the look of what I am designing is correct for what I want. So with measuring the space that the layout will be occupying, I got the measurements 1800mm by 400mm (70 inches by 16 inches) so as you can imagine this is going to be a small layout. But you can see from the picture it will be a two seprate sections that make up the whole layout. With a surrounding backdrop, which the setting will still be decided.

Construction Materials

Well the main part of the construction materials will be recycled from my first layout ‘Boddington’ as money is not at a premium and it is a great idea to recycle on what ever you are doing. So the frame work of this layout will be made from 17mm x 37mm pine, and thankfully I have a lot of this material in my workshop. The the main part of the baseboard will be made of 12mm chipboard again cause I have alot of it in my workshop, even though a lot of Railway Modellers prefer to use Ply wood for this application I am not too fussed. And ply wood seems to be a very expensive option for me right now. Then the backdrop for this layout will be made of 3mm hardboard and yes you guessed it “Cause I have a lot of this laying around my workshop.” So now that I have the idea and I know what materials I will be using time to make the plans.

Creating The Plans

Well I know that most people won’t go to the extremes of creating a full 2D CAD drawing of a model layout, and would just prefer to just draw the plans on a piece of paper with a pencil. But I think it is something that can be over looked as it sometimes highlights problems with my ideas and I can change the plan before I start construction of any project, to avoid wasting any materials. As I am always reminded that “The key to a strong building is solid foundations”

When drawing my 2D CAD Plans I use DraftSight a free professional 2D CAD design product made by Dassault Systemes, as I proberly have mentioned many times before. If you would like to find out where to download you own copy of DraftSight you can do so using this link.

As you can see from the picture to the right of this text I have laid out the plans for the construction in the form of 4 views a front view, a side view, a bottom view and an Isometric view. Having all these views on one sheet with all the dimentions will greatly reduce any error in the building of this layout baseboard. With the addition of an Isometric View to can help to visualise the whole construction when building the separate parts.

Naming The Layout

As normal for me I tent to name layout after something around me or something that has influenced the build of the layout, as I am sure it is for many other modeller that are designing a fictional railway layout. For example the ‘Boddington‘ Layout was named so as I drunk Boddington’s Bitter while I was laying the track and making the scenery so I named it ‘Boddington.’ And the trend continued on with the layout, ‘Fosters Rail Scrapyard‘ guess what I was drinking when I modelled that particular section of the layout?

But how did I come up with ‘Voxville TMD‘? Well it was not as interesting as my last layout, cause I knew I wanted to model a Train Maintenance Depo ‘TMD‘ so that was a start. But what to name it, well while I was thinking of fictional name I glanced over my right shoulder and saw my VOX Guitar amplifier. And the name was fixed ‘Voxville TMD‘

The Build

Now that I have all these views available to me on one sheet I can start the build part of this project.

To findout about the construction of this railway layout please go to the “Recycling A Railway Layout” series Page 

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