Simplicity and Layout Planning

One of the emerging themes in the model railroad world is the call to simplicity.  A recent blog post by Lance Mindheim on September 17, 2012 on the one switch layout.  The pressure to build the empire is hard to resist.  When you read the magazines there is a natural reaction among many that 'I can do that!!' or 'I can do that better'.  While the reaction is natural the tendency to overlook the costs of those empires and the delayed fun is big.  What is the cost of a large layout.  A double deck layout replicating the operations of a division of a railroad in a 1000 plus square foot basement would require tremendous resources.  You may think that I overstate the issue, but a typical mid size division could easily require 30 locos minimum to run just 3 through passenger and 3 through freights each way not including switchers, local passenger trains and way freight trains.  If you are running in the steam era then you may need to triple that number to allow for changing the engine upon the trains arrival and departure from each end of the layout. 

Over the last twenty years I have never finished anything but modules.  Usually my layouts consist of modules set up to either run in circles or back and forth.  In O Scale I have seen set up track temporarily with a switch or two and a lead.  Running an Atlas O Scale 0-6-0 USRA switcher and switching cars is fun even with a short track for O Scale and a few cars.  The very full bass sound adds a dimension not available in smaller scales due to speaker size.  

Perhaps my constant yearning and hoarding of materials and items for a large layout is just wrong headed thinking when I have had in front of me an answer all the time.  A smaller layout with less maintenance and easy expansion would give satisfaction now and in the future. Build it using LED (Layout Element Dominoes) which I will go into in a future post will allow things to keep moving.

Time to go play