PROJECT DREAM RAILWAY

I wanna say around five or six years ago- I was probably 12 years old -I had a dream of having a large model railway in my basement, complete with HO track and all. Now with this dream, I had these obstacles in my way - money, space, strength/age, and those damned curves the electric tracks had (the large curves meant they'd take up a ton of space). While cleaning out my computers files, I stumbled across my old plan I created many years ago, in the form of a scanned blueprint. This drawing is attached.



Looking back at my position now, I realized that this dream of a railway with self-operating trains COULD happen....in the form of those glorious blue plastic tracks...

I chose Plarail for a number of reasons, but the one that strikes me the most is the fact that pieces are still in production, and new products are being issued regularly.

On the map, each line is a single set of tracks. Given we are working with Plarail now, this could be expanded and modified. Each large square is supposed to be a folding table.

Does anybody here use a planner (or design their layouts) prior to construction? I would love to hear your opinions!
If I stick to this plan, how would I incorporate additional elements such as Roller Coaster Mountain, the Shaking Bridge, and the Gigantic Thomas tunnel?

Thanks a million everybody!

[Super]

That is so cool that you found this. You should keep this and show it to your kids as you get older. I hope if you do build it you will photograph your progress for us and thanks for sharing this, I like it.

[ripley802]

Nice work. Yes, I too have often wondered about using some sort of software to design a layout. To be honest I have not researched it too much yet but would be interested as well in what others use. It would be great to have something from Tomy that would allow you to calculate the number of straights, curves, etc...

I might go and make a Photoshop template of basic straights, curves, etc.. If I can get accurate measurements of them, I might be able to do something.

I never Plan out what to build, i just try to connect gimmick destinations (Especially the darn Road ones) and build off of that.

There's certainly layout planning software out there. The one I know of, because some Hornby Dublo 3-rail people use it, is Anyrail. They list a huge range of systems in their library, including Lego and Playmobil, but not Tomy. It might be worth approaching them if there's interest from the blue plastic tracks community.

Yeah, Tomy Tracks are considerably less wide than HO tracks in terms of curves. I can barely fit an HO track circle in my room, while i can make two Tomy circles

like the layout i wish there was more on layouts. i used to like trying to think up configurations that would give unpredictable outcomes, a good tool for this is one or more of the x intersections and loops where trains can turn back in the opposite direction.

I never Plan out what to build, i just try to connect gimmick destinations (Especially the darn Road ones) and build off of that.

It's ironic you say that, becuase when I was younger, I always tried so hard to include the few road destinations I had becuase I liked them, (generic crossing, Thomas and Bertie set station).
:3

I personally tried to get an idea of what the layout would look like with the track only, as I would then have to configure the much smaller amount of road I had into the layout. But every time, I would be missing "just one riser" or "just one straight"