Island layouts

[steinjr]

Mountainman - you must be flattered that all of us want to decide what layout is best for you.

I don't. I think MountainMan should choose for himself what he wants to build, and that he is totally capable of making his own decisions.

I didn't initially reply to his question about free-standing multiform layouts that avoid the walls, since I knew that he had already gotten a decent suggestion from Charlie back in March about a sensible layout shape for his room.

What I was picking on was that MM took a rather unusual special case (a large room with just narrow shelves around the walls and plenty of empty floor space in the middle of the room), and used that to make a rather sweeping generalization about how around-the-room style layouts in general is inferior ("limiting and wasteful of space") to walk-around layouts.

I think people should in general probably try to avoid making overly generalized statements about how this way of modeling is always superior to that way of modeling, or how this way of modeling is always inferior to that way of modeling.

In any given specific situation some approach may have more advantages and fewer disadvantages than another approach, given some specific design goal. In another situation and with other design goals, another approach might have worked better.

Seriously I hope that some of this gives you ideas. If you have access to old Model Railroader magazines (from the 50s and 60s), they use to have a regular feature called "track plan of the month". Back then, there wasn't really such thing as an "around the walls" layout. I doubt any of these track plans would give you exactly what you want, but they are interesting and creative, and have some ideas that may be useful.

Well, he might get ideas from older track plans, but I think that in this case the best approach for him would be to do a custom design to fit in the scenes he wants on his layout.

I can't recall off hand what types of scenes MM wants (if he has written about that), what era, what location, what type traffic etc. But maybe we all working together can come up with some suggestions that might spark more ideas for MountainMan if he tells us more (or reminds us) about what his design goals are.

Smile,
Stein