Layout Archive 2

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Last update on 16 May 2010

The archive page has grown large enough to warrant a break and starting a new one.  The first page contains layout diagrams from 1995 through the summer of 2007.  Here we continue in fall of 2007.

We were invited to the annual train show of the Lockheed Martin Recreation Association for the first time.  That organization offers a wide variety of activities for the company employees.  The model railroaders are a very active group, holding this show every year for a long time now.  Our allocated space was similar to what we have in Plano in January, so the layout is designed in that fashion also.

The 2007 Holiday Show in Ft. Worth saw yet another variation on our full layout.  Only the new junction set was missing.

We joined the large layout at the 2007 Oklahoma City Train Show again with a number of modules, scattered through the layout.  New participants there were Russell Straw with his fantastic Sugar Land set and the Boot Hill club from Garden City in Kansas.  (Diagram courtesy of Lee Williams.)  The T-Trak afficionados were our neighbors againhave followed the NTRAK example and established their own multi-club layout, one way or another always next to the NTRAK one.

In January 2008, we were back at Plano with yet another limited-space version of our layout.  We built a nearly closed horseshoe, running the whole layout on DCC.  We repeated this in 2010, for which the layout diagram is included below.

In March, we set up again in downtown Fort Worth for the show organized by Great Train Expo.  Oklahoma N-Rail, AustNtrak and the Sheperd family from Amarillo joined us this time.

Wills Point's Bluebird Festival has become a fixture in our calendar by now.  Our layout in Mitchell Hall (previously the freight room of the former T&P Depot) and the 12" to the foot UP line outside made again for a very enjoyable weekend.

June brought our second trip to the National N Scale Convention, this time in Louiville in Kentucky.  With four hands, we hauled in two vehicles 30 of our modules to participate in the largest NTRAK layout ever in the country to this date, with over 700 modules and a continuous run on the red line of over 100 scale miles.  The diagram is nearly final (a few modules from the shorter arm moved into the main loop 7) and was put together by Frank Wethington of the hosting KSONS club.

In fall, we returned to the LMRA show.  A little more space than last year allowed us to set up yet another variation of our space savers.

The Holiday Show needed to be moved to December in 2008, and also to a different venue, the Convention Center in downtown Fort Worth.  To ease the tansportation burden, we left a few modules home and gave ourselves a little more space inside the layout.

Another year gone by, almost everybody returned to the Oklahoma City Train Show, and Lee came up with yet another layout fitting into the allocated space - the show has been filling the Travel and Tarnsportation Building to the rim for many years now.

In Plano in 2009, we repeated the 2007 layout again, shown on the first layout archive page.

We attended the GT Expo show again this year.  The Sheperds were happy to return for a joint layout.

Another somewhat unusual invitation came to us in spring of 2009 from Clark Gardens, a private botanical garden located between Weatherford and Mineral Wells, west of Fort Worth.  They have some train setups in an enclosed Gazebo with a large garden railroad layout just outside of it, and had a Garden Railroad Club join their Spring Festival weekend.  Intent on expanding this component, they offered us space in their special events tent, set up on a former tennis court.  We built a horseshoe with a new twist: The Quarry end loop was at one end, and being a single track turning loop, required coordination between trains running the red and yellow lines respectively, both haring the single loop track.  Operating in all-DCC mode, this turned out to be a very enjoyable experience for us.  There was one small addition compared to the diagram - we inserted our two 1-foot modules to the left and right of the 3-module Prairie set.

At Wills Point, we tried for the first time to set up two loops by ourselves, with our second junction set being ready for operation.  Our complementary 45 degree corners gently broke the "spine" between the loops, keeping up our philosophy of not setting up in straight rectangular fashion.  This is the last time that we used the three Prairie modules, which form the straight section on the left side of the left loop.

Corey took two modules to San Antonio in summer; we unfortunatly don't have a good near-final diagram to show.

In September we met with the SANTRAK club from San Antonio sort of half way in Temple at the annual CentraMod train show.  They are rotatign clubs in and out every year, and this was our turn.  It should have been 2008, but Hurricane Ike literally blew a lot of people out of their homes at the gulf coast, and the Frank Mayborn Convention Center served as one of many storm refugee centers in the state.  The San Antonio group has come up with some nifty corner and end modules to allow a layout without any interior space that one would have to crawl into.  We contributed a 16-foot block of modules (3 4-ft modules, and the pair of 2-foot modules) to this layout.  (Sketch courtesy of Bill Carpenter.)

The LMRA show in October 2009 saw a third variation of our smaller layout setups.  (Sorry, we don't have photos of this one.)

The Holiday Show returned to its traditional date and location, in mid November 2009 in the Will Rogers Memorial Park in Fort Worth.  We used again a moderate loop of modules and two arms.  Here the new 4-module version of the Prairie Yard was used for the first time, featuring sidings to both the red and alt-blue line that are suitable for setup and offer more room than the old sidings did (taken one at a time).

We skipped Oklahoma City this year, so our next show was the one in Plano in January 2010.  Here we revived the horseshoe concept of 2008, again having a pure DCC layout..

In March 2010, we returned to Clark Gardens, repeating the approach of last year with a horseshow with the single-track Quarry loop at one end.  The room between the two arms - legs? - was actually a bit wider, thanks again to our 1-foot modules that we sneaked in to extend the short side on the right in the diagram.

At Wills Point, we put our junction modules to work again, this time to support two arms with the two big end loops.  We missed getting the foot of a module onto the weighing platform by a fraction of an inch - we actually used a small wood block to provide support for the module from the solid ground around the corner of the platform.