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Reply to "Busy fingers and your layout"

It is interesting to read about the different approaches to this issue - and they are as varied as our individual approaches to our equipment and layouts - regardless if we have museum-quality dioramas or simple ovals. 

Personally, as I first developed my layout 16 years ago,  I thought hard about this - as a dad of then-young kids, I wanted to be able to show everything off to them and their friends and parents without making access (or discipline) an issue. In fact, one of the reasons I moved out of N gauge into O at the time was the size and (very relative) robustness of our larger equipment.

My solution (which has worked well over the years) was to control access through the height of the layout - something not quite changeable because the layout was built atop a rock-filled crawlspace with a 4 1/2 ft high concrete retaining wall setting it off from the rest of the basement. I put a long removable bench where smaller kids could climb on it to view and I put things at the front of this bench that they could touch or that I wasn't worried about their playing with. My 'better things' were further back out of reach. There were buttons to jab to make things move and make sounds - including one of those Soundmaster boxes with a whistle slider. Visitors tall enough to not need the bench seem to have better impulse control...

OGR Publishing, Inc., 1310 Eastside Centre Ct, Suite 6, Mountain Home, AR 72653
800-980-OGRR (6477)
www.ogaugerr.com

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