Island layouts

[steinjr]

I don't recall saying that either of those were "wasteful of space". I did say that I felt that along-the-wall layouts were, in my opinion, because they depend upon using only a narrow strip along the walls, often substituting distance for realism.

Mmm, yes - I suppose that if you have a big room and only use a narrow ledge around the walls, leaving a huge empty space in the middle of the room, which you have no use for for any other purposes, then yes - it could fairly be considered to be wasteful of space.

Of course, in practical terms, in the case of a big room with no other uses for the center of the room, I don't really know of any fan of shelf layouts who would advocate not adding a a peninsula or two to an around-the-walls shelf layout if you have the space for it.

Just like I don't know any fan of island style layouts who advocate not expanding a island style layout if you have the room for further peninsulas and lobes, without getting into too many problems with too narrow access aisles around the layout and too long reaches.

A fundamental law of layout building is that a layout will expand to take all available space, and then you start wondering about how to make a little more space available ...

Realism is in the eye of the beholder. You can make scenes look reasonably realistic on a four or five foot wide island layout with a center divider, or on a 2 or 2 1/2 foot deep shelf up against a wall - makes little difference in actual practice - in either case it would be 2 to 2 1/2 foot from the layout edge to a "wall".

Would a scene it look more realistic on an island style layout without a center divider ? Depends on what you model, and whether it would be realistic to have tracks passing through the scene both close to you and four or five feet away at the same time and whether the aisle and background on the other side of the island would be visually distracting or not.

Also, it often takes more space to model a fully 3-dimensional object (mountain, building, whatever) that you can view from any direction than it takes to model a 2 1/2 dimensional object (a not very deep structure that gets cut off at the backdrop/center divider) that only can be viewed from one side.

I sometimes trot out these two drawings to illustrate room use for an island style and a shelf style layout in a bedroom sized room, and to illustrate that mountains can be made on shelf style layouts too:





Here is a couple of picture showing what a much more talented modeler than me can do scenically with a mainly shelf style layout in a bigger room:





More pictures from that layout here: http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm237/GrampysTrains/

But by all means - I totally agree that for your circumstances - largish room, many doors and windows that you can't/won't block, it makes a lot more sense to build a walk-around or walk-in layout in the middle of the room - single level if you prefer, or mushroom style if you have the space and inclination, rather than try to force in an around-the-walls style layout.

Layout shape obviously should be adapted to the site where the layout is built. There is no single layout shape or type of layout that always is superior under all circumstances and for all shapes.

As for whether your middle of the floor layout would work best as a walk-around, a walk-in, or some kind of donut shape layout with a lift-out, swing gate or duck-under, or whether you want a continuous run or point to point layout - that's another discussion entirely.

There are quite a few interesting options out there.

Grin,
Stein