Feb 24 2009
Planning Your Outdoor Garden Railroad - Part 8
Planning Your Outdoor Garden Railroad - Part 8
Your three dimensional model should give you a fairly good idea of sight lines and angles of the outdoor garden railroad. It should help you imagine the overall proportions of the railroad withing the landscape.
Miniature buildings in the form of simple solid cubes and rectangles topped off with simplified roof lines should give you a fairly accurate sense of the view breaks and the rhythm of the scenes. If the scenes are too close together or the view breaks don’t seem to work your three dimensional model will reveal this at a very early stage of development and planning.
While you can make all kinds of adjustments, extensions and modifications as you go along, and you probably will. It is much better to make some of these discoveries in the planning stage. It is far easier to move around some clay, flour and salt dough, or small cardboard buildings, than it is to dig dirt, haul wheel barrows full of soil, and build, tear down, and rebuild whole scenes. You’re planning to anticipate outcomes, limit effort and frustrations later. Otherwise you could just start laying track and buildings on the ground and see how it goes. In the end that’s the hard way.
Trains are relatively large too. Make up a few cardboard mock ups of trains. Simple cubes and solid rectangles of the correct length height and width will be sufficient. They will reveal if your curves are too tight. Does your cardboard box train look too large for a station, siding, scene, or curve. Maybe you’ll have to adjust your track layout or scenes to accommodate the basic dimensions of a typical train. Don’t forget to add enough cars. Is The engine the right length? Will you be running two engines to haul the train up the hill? Will you have a full caboose or just a flashing rear end device (light) on the end of your train?Think about operations such as making up a train. One or two cars is way too short for a realistic looking train, even with compression or implication. Put more than one train on your three dimensional model of your railroad. How does it look? Will it still work? Do you want or need storage or set up areas and tracks? Tip: Most railroaders regret not planning for enough storage or setup areas. Be a little generous and add a few more car lengths here if you can.
You’re really refining your plan at this point. Take some pictures. Take photos of the overall view. Take some more photos trying to get really closeup and nearly the same angles as your operators, photographers and visitors. Most cameras have some distortion when you get very close up, so the photos may not represent an exact image of the planned outdoor garden railroad. That’s OK. Don’t get delayed or distracted by details. You’re trying to get an idea of general massing and proportions, not exact lines, colors or materials.
Have some one take a few more pictures of you and the three dimensional plan. Add all of these photos and some fresh comments and reflections to your Build Journal.
Have fun!
Trainguy
