Hi Everyone,
We are building (plans are with the county right now for approval) an addition to our house and once it's completed (??!) I will have some space (not a lot) for a small O27 layout. After looking at some pictures of small layouts on the internet, and of layouts in general in OGR magazine, I came up with the following dog bone plan in the pic here. It's 9'4" (112") wide and 3'4" (40") deep. I used the free version of Anyrail software to design it, and over the past year or so I've been buying everything I need; I think I've got everything now except for just the space to start putting it together. Track is solid rail MTH RealTrax because after testing it against hollow rail and Lionel FastTrack, the solid rail RealTrax was noticeably less noisy than the other two. Also, MTH RealTrax O31 curves are in reality about O27 and so take up slightly less space than FastTrack. The buildings are all MTH and are shown to scale, but limitations of my ability using the Anyrail software make them seem like they take up too much space for the road and track. When I did a dry-run with the actual track and buildings all laid out together, everything fit all right and the road is at least 7" wide almost everywhere. The two sidings will be separate blocks. The turnouts are O42 and so are a few curves. Except for a couple of O82 curves at the top of the plan, all the other curves are O31. The track with black rectangles in the middle are operating tracks. The rectangles on the road represent cars, and (hard to see) on the track - stretching from just above the level crossing to "Apt. #1" - is an outline of a steam engine hauled passenger train with 6 coaches to help provide a sense of scale.
I'm finally pretty happy with the design but I would certainly be happy to hear constructive criticism about it.
Matt
