I have a friend Jordan in Ohio who is always planning new freemo modules or layouts and on Monday he asked me to help him with his track plan for a basement layout.

A quick run down of his requirements were:

Must haves:

• set circa 1920
• 10-12 car trains
• Has to be modular no longer than 5ft modules
• needs to go against a wall but access at each end is required.

Nice to haves:

• Urban scene
• Must be able to pass two trains
• Classification Yard
• Some Industries to include LCL
• Roundhouse/loco servicing
• 2/3 crews but could be operated by one person.
• House track in front of the Depot (its 1920’s they ran Passenger Cars)

I love drawing track plans and layout design and I often help folks out with their plans. With Jordan being in Ohio and myself in the UK we used some video conferencing software and shared my AnyRail screen so we could discuss the plan together as we went. To be honest he watch a youtube video on Dave Abeles Onganda Cutoff but hey thats how it goes.

What we eventually came up with was a small yard buried in the inner city jungle of 1920’s Ohio which tall buildings forming urban canyons and view blocks. The yard has a 19 car capacity and two pennisulars provide local switching work for the yard, including a LCL Railroad Warehouse.

On the otherside of the yard is a small roundhouse and space for either a car repair shops or an REA or other warehouse in the urban part of the layout. The layout can either be operated with staging yards or part of a Freemo set up or even on its own as a small switching layout.

So now we need some staging, I suggested to Jordan that two Balloon style reversing loops one with stub ended staging in the middle would work best for him as they can be made using 4×8 sheets of ply.

Ah ha! We are making progress so lets see this thing finally fitted into the space that Jordan has. Of course it does and its obvious this is going to be a really fun layout to run. The grey areas are places that can’t be covered or blocked but we have avoided those and there is still plenty of space in the room for entertaining.

Well its the start of another weekend so lets get back to the workbench.