Layout Design: Breaking the Boundaries

Building a 4’ x 8’ layout is some sort of blessing when you come back to that style of design after dabbling for years with along the walls layouts and modules. Sure, the plywood sheet has a lot of limitations, but many of them are self imposed to some extend.

A river should be an invitation, not a menacing corner

Over the last month, I’ve been exploring my ideas more freely, considering advice by the whimsical mind of Chris Mears. When he drew the Japanese circular a few weeks ago, he didn’t stick to the circular footprint. The circle was an efficient way to make the trains move, but it wasn’t a good shape to tell a story and craft a landscape. All kind of bulges started to appear, and it was interesting to see how he would create very important deviation just to make sure the scene was great. It was a perfect decoupling of track from fascia.

When dealing with the ASTF-themed layout, I wanted to be more artistic, just as I did with the Stanstead module. For this reason, instead of conforming to a rectangle, I decided to make my scenic elements breath in a better framed context. One trick I did was to paint a mockup river on the bare plywood. No need to wait a long time before imagining it. It's there and it informs all my decisions, including sidings, roads, structures, topography. Everything becomes more intuitive rather than calculated and mechanical.

A culvert needs room to breathe

When I built the stone culvert, it became clear it was foolish to have poured so many artistic efforts into it to have zero foreground to appreciate it in context. For that reason, I decided to build an extension with some ¼” plywood to have more space in front of it. Somewhere to gaze from, to take beautiful pictures and feel the entire scene. I didn’t care about the future fascia location, only caring about having the physical space required to have a good-looking scene. The fascia is a consideration that will come in the future when it’s time to link every scenes. Already, I can imagine several bulges and alcoves creating compelling points of views. The station is probably one of these places where the layout will expand to better serve its purpose.

Even track is informed by these scenic choices

In hindsight, postponing Monk is a blessing. I know my mindset will be somewhere else, more open to opportunities, etc. Your exploration about how the foreground must vary and inform the visual experience really destroyed many of my personal assumptions. I had instinctively done it with Stanstead, but never pushed the idea further and you often sketched scenes that did take that as a given, something that shoudl be naturally implemented, almost obvious.

Things must flow