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Peter's Model Railroading | Articles | Layouts | Layout #8
Lessons Learned

 

Third, this was the time of going full LED for everything. LED strip lighting had been very expensive, but as more and more people started using it, mass-production got the prices down very quickly. I experimented with LED lighting, and liked the strips the best. I also made the decision during this time to also use these for my room lighting. I haven't used a fluorescent or old-fashioned lightbulb since 2015.

Second, I really like the hand-laying track method I used of making individual tie plates and gluing the rail to that. It is time-consuming, but looks great and it does work for short pieces of rail. So, going forward, if all I need is straight or curved track (i.e. no turnouts) on a single module, I'll go ahead and use commercial flextrack, as that speeds up the track-laying phase tremendously. But, if a module has turnouts or crossings, I am going to lay that with my tie plates method.

However, there were a few things that I learned that I did like. First, the idea of going fully modular with small, manageable modules was the way to go.

So, first, the foam topic. The last experiment with the four layers of 3/4" blue insulation foamboard, still kind of baffles me. However, in the intervening years (with the benefit of hindsight as I am adding this page to my layout summary), I have learned that this insulation board does tend to shrink as it ages. So, instead of the second module's foam rising, it could well have been that the first module's foam was shrinking. There was almost two years of time difference between when I bought those sheets, and who knows how long they had been sitting at the home center (there's isn't that much of a turn-over of these boards here). So, the first module's foamboard could have been from a delivery that had been sitting in the store for a while, and the second module's foamboard could have been from a recent shipment. Who knows? Either way, it was clear to me, through anecdotal evidence, that foam is not a good material to use for layout construction. Other modelers swear by it. The only foamboard I had not tried was that which is known as Gatorfoam, and that was because, at the time, I simply did not have the funds available to buy that, but I was aware of its existence, and had seen it used in a home modular layout at a local N-scale modeler who has a very large layout in a dedicated building.

On this two-and-a-half year journey in search of a better way to build modules, I did learn a lot. While one could make the argument that I should have just gone straight to the standard 3/4" plywood module construction that most clubs use for their modular layouts, I also knew from experience that those plywood-based modules are heavy, especially if you have to carry them by yourself. I really was on a mission to find a lighter-weight alternative.