SCARM a godsend.

[D605Eagle]

I've been slowly converting my attic into a railway room and workshop for a couple of years, (work and other house renovating projects have slowed the process down somewhat) but now I'm at the stage of putting up the base boards. I've been fretting with how I was going to put the track down, I had ideas in my mind what features I wanted on the layout. Fortunately I was recommended the layout planning program SCARM which is a joy to use and its !!FREE!! Heres what I plan to build. No curves are sharper than 1.3m diameter and no slopes are steeper than 1:75. The only thing not shown is the underground coach storage yard. SCARM also tells you how much track you need too which is handy. Using flexy track it works out how many lengths you need to fill in all the pieces which is quite clever.
The rather windy section on the bottom board is a street running section, and follows the road.

[jon_1066]

SCARM also has a rather nifty feature where you can export the layout as a jpeg file. Go to File - Export then select jpeg from the drop down file type menu. Saves doing a screen dump.

[Roger (RJ)]

The export facility would be far better if it exported as a png or gif file. Jpegs, or jpg's are great for photos but introduce blurring to line drawings such as track diagrams and wiring diagrams, while png's and gif's don't.

[Back2trains]

That is some layout D605eagle

I wish I had half that space, I will see if I can upload my humble proposed SCARM layout.

[Back2trains]

Here is my proposed layout.

SCARM really does make designing easy

160111-PECO-New_layout-800.jpg (95.52 KiB) Viewed 1924 times

The layout is only 2.65m long

[D605Eagle]

Thats a good little layout. What era are you basing it in?

[Back2trains]

Thats a good little layout. What era are you basing it in?

Thank you D605Eagle.

It is only and out and back layout, but for me I thought better than a East/West, West/East layout in the space I have as it allows twice the running length and adds interest for uncoupling and playing as well as running trains. I am not sticking strictly to an era, I have a mixture of steam/diesel/dmu's so lots of ways to play I think.

To me the running of trains, planning routes and fiddling is more important than an era, although I also understand why others do model to an era.