3 min in and I'm already sold!!!! It is absolutely awsome that you have the opportunity to design this into your house. Love the AutoCAD presentation, make it visibly understandable. Anything you come up with will be benchmark material. This will be great to follow along how things progress! Cheers 🍻 Earl
Never heard of "mushroom" layout before. Quite honestly a great idea! My first thought is how accessible the upper level will be for wiring, installing switch motors etc. None of the backbreaking laying on the floor upside down nonsense. I am also impressed with the use of Sketchup for planning. As a career draftsman I have "built" many a layout in SU and AutoCAD over the years... however, progressing them to 'cutting plywood and lumber for benchwork stage' always seems to be the project stall point!! Good Luck, we'll all stay tuned! in the meantime I'll keep on coming back for the transload type projects. Thanks for your posts.
Great comment! SketchUp is fantastic for making a "cutting list". I just keep my laptop close by and measure directly off the drawing. Built a few cabinets this way. Got the cuts sub-millimeter. The upper 🍄 deck might be easier to do in 8ft sections on the ground. Just place them on the subframe above once wires pulled through. I don't like overhead work so I'll definitely try to minimize that part. There isn't much on mushroom layouts but as you can see it gave me a 3rd easily accessible level. Did I gain any space over doing one central spine down the centre? Not sure. But I did gain an area under the walkway for staging, and I'm using every last inch of height.
Looks like it will be a fair size layout 👍 I like the idea on the different levels and the centre platform very cool. Well we will look forward to seeing this in the future. Great share Matt have a great day and enjoy those trains 😎🚂🫵 TSM
Thanks Mike. Yes, a fair size. Likely build it out slowly kinda like how Tim is doing the Seaboard Central. That would keep me motivated to get to the top level
But i hope it's not overwhelming to have so much to fill. I do love that you are doing Hamilton and surrounding area. It's great to see local stuff in our area by local youtuber!!!Just like what Wade is doing at the club! Hamilton piers down along the Steel mill, that's a lot. There is the Nation Car Assembly there too isn't it?. I feel like small potatoes watching you and Wade do your work. I got so much to learn in building scenery and weathering and I'm already 54!!! Earl
Hahaha. Hey man, big dreams, doesn't mean it'll all come true... but I can see it all in my mind and that's a start. Right now I can do the more detailed buildings with a better idea of the space they'll occupy. My buildings take forever to build so just having those 1/2 done will be super beneficial.
Basement will likely be unheated so lesser of two evils i think. Not sure what I'll do just yet but basement isn't ruled out completely. Thanks for watching
Matt, that is a very ambitious plan, and the no-lix is definitely better than a hidden helix. I'm not terribly familiar with the territory you want to model, so I'll leave that to more knowledgeable commenters. My biggest concern about the design is the human element. I'm only 53, but I have some health issues which make the trek from the garage workshop into the house and then down a 3-foot-wide staircase into my basement a major pain in the caboose. Looking at your plan, I keep dreading the task of hauling all of that lumber upstairs to the attic! Now, you could just add the benchwork to the house contract - but I'm not sure how that would fly with the building permits and safety inspections. Plan B would be to have a wide staircase instead of a standard width one, and a mechanical lift for the lumber installed to make it more manageable. BTW, I've already floated the idea of cutting a 6" x 5-foot slot in the living room floor for getting lumber and benchwork frames down to the basement... it was not well received by upper management. 😢 If I had the funds to build a new structure on my property, I'd probably go with a 50x100 space, dedicating 50x75 to the layout and 50x25 to a garage & workshop, and connect that to the house with greenhouse passageway, maybe with a koi pond or hottub (or both) as an all-weather lounge space for the family - and it could double as a crew lounge. Expensive? Probably. But if this is your forever home, or even a generational home to pass down to the kids and grandkids, then the "luxury" features will pay dividends down the road. Building costs seldom get cheaper.
Whoa! Thanks for the comments. I'm almost 50 myself but I like to think of myself as 35. I've been renovating houses since 2001 and built a great deal of the one I'm currently living in so I'm no stranger to hard labour. This layout might be something built at a workbench 6ft sections at a time and then set in place and joined up on a skeleton framework. Thinking of using spline for the nolix sections. To be honest, it's the block creation and wiring that has me most worried. A layout this size could easily eat up $5-6k in electronic controls if I'm not careful. Been playing around with Arduinos and sketches to control turnouts with mixed success. Block detection and signaling are possible, but complicated. My excess cash and time go into mountain bikes. Can't sit still! Wide staircases and doorways, couldn't agree more. My first houses were 100 year old and moving any furniture was tetris/physics/gymnastics all in one. NEVER doing that again.
Hi Matt & it's is Randy and i like yours video is Cool & Thanks Matt & Friends & Randy & Good Luck With Yours New Ho Scale Mushroom & Layout & Thanks Matt & Friends Randy
I love it. Running at scale speed, it could take the better part of an hour to go from staging to the farthest point. That would make for some nice op sessions. I'm thinking about a ramp system on my layout. I'm in a 10 x 13 room. The lower deck will be 40 inches high, the second deck would be 60 inches. I need to figure out if I can climb 20 inches in around 40 feet. 😊😊😊
Hi Paul. Thanks for watching again. I would seriously reconsider the 20 inch gap between levels if you can. I think you would be surprised at how 16 inches would suffice assuming your top deck is set back from the lower by 3 to 4 inches. I'd do a mock up using cardboard to check sight lines. If you're running consisted locos and you have a straight run, you could hide a 7% grade and get up to the second level real quick!
Not sure if you said it but I would recommend doing the SOR on the green bit. Works as an end to end opp and could realistically come out of Hamilton if you branched off the Dundas somehow (or if you wanna push it just say it was never abandoned from Hamilton to Caledonia)
I had forgotten about that. Yes, I have a ton of gondolas specifically for bringing in slabs to the hamilton area for rolling. Cool opportunity to run my BNSF 2098 over the grand river too! Thanks for the tip!
@ idk how I forgot about the bridge but yeah that would be a cool feature. You don’t even have to go all the way to nanticoke, garnet yard would work as a good interchange too
I love this layout and the idea of not using helixes. That being said, I sense claustrophobia and excessive heat in the summer months. Can that be addressed? Also, what about safety issues should a fire break out?
Thanks for your comment. I plan on using SIPS for wall, ceiling, and floor of the house and i will have a white roof. The house I'm in now is 4 years old and we run the AC 3 to 4 times during the summer and on sunny winter days the furnace never comes on. Not worried about hot or cold. Fire, there will likely be a door by the office/work bench area. Too nice back there not to have the door open during summer days. It will defo be claustrophobic. Can't do much about that except focus on running trains!
3 min in and I'm already sold!!!! It is absolutely awsome that you have the opportunity to design this into your house. Love the AutoCAD presentation, make it visibly understandable. Anything you come up with will be benchmark material. This will be great to follow along how things progress!
Cheers 🍻
Earl
Thanks Earl. It's a long way off but it does have me excited. Really keen on the opportunities the 4 branchlines create
Never heard of "mushroom" layout before. Quite honestly a great idea! My first thought is how accessible the upper level will be for wiring, installing switch motors etc. None of the backbreaking laying on the floor upside down nonsense. I am also impressed with the use of Sketchup for planning. As a career draftsman I have "built" many a layout in SU and AutoCAD over the years... however, progressing them to 'cutting plywood and lumber for benchwork stage' always seems to be the project stall point!! Good Luck, we'll all stay tuned! in the meantime I'll keep on coming back for the transload type projects. Thanks for your posts.
Great comment! SketchUp is fantastic for making a "cutting list". I just keep my laptop close by and measure directly off the drawing. Built a few cabinets this way. Got the cuts sub-millimeter. The upper 🍄 deck might be easier to do in 8ft sections on the ground. Just place them on the subframe above once wires pulled through. I don't like overhead work so I'll definitely try to minimize that part. There isn't much on mushroom layouts but as you can see it gave me a 3rd easily accessible level. Did I gain any space over doing one central spine down the centre? Not sure. But I did gain an area under the walkway for staging, and I'm using every last inch of height.
Looks like it will be a fair size layout 👍 I like the idea on the different levels and the centre platform very cool. Well we will look forward to seeing this in the future. Great share Matt have a great day and enjoy those trains 😎🚂🫵 TSM
Thanks Mike. Yes, a fair size. Likely build it out slowly kinda like how Tim is doing the Seaboard Central. That would keep me motivated to get to the top level
But i hope it's not overwhelming to have so much to fill. I do love that you are doing Hamilton and surrounding area. It's great to see local stuff in our area by local youtuber!!!Just like what Wade is doing at the club! Hamilton piers down along the Steel mill, that's a lot. There is the Nation Car Assembly there too isn't it?. I feel like small potatoes watching you and Wade do your work. I got so much to learn in building scenery and weathering and I'm already 54!!!
Earl
Hahaha. Hey man, big dreams, doesn't mean it'll all come true... but I can see it all in my mind and that's a start. Right now I can do the more detailed buildings with a better idea of the space they'll occupy. My buildings take forever to build so just having those 1/2 done will be super beneficial.
The mushroom idea is a good one, but I'd definitely go with the basement for it. The anged roof slopes are too restricting.
Basement will likely be unheated so lesser of two evils i think. Not sure what I'll do just yet but basement isn't ruled out completely. Thanks for watching
Matt, that is a very ambitious plan, and the no-lix is definitely better than a hidden helix. I'm not terribly familiar with the territory you want to model, so I'll leave that to more knowledgeable commenters.
My biggest concern about the design is the human element. I'm only 53, but I have some health issues which make the trek from the garage workshop into the house and then down a 3-foot-wide staircase into my basement a major pain in the caboose. Looking at your plan, I keep dreading the task of hauling all of that lumber upstairs to the attic!
Now, you could just add the benchwork to the house contract - but I'm not sure how that would fly with the building permits and safety inspections. Plan B would be to have a wide staircase instead of a standard width one, and a mechanical lift for the lumber installed to make it more manageable.
BTW, I've already floated the idea of cutting a 6" x 5-foot slot in the living room floor for getting lumber and benchwork frames down to the basement... it was not well received by upper management. 😢
If I had the funds to build a new structure on my property, I'd probably go with a 50x100 space, dedicating 50x75 to the layout and 50x25 to a garage & workshop, and connect that to the house with greenhouse passageway, maybe with a koi pond or hottub (or both) as an all-weather lounge space for the family - and it could double as a crew lounge.
Expensive? Probably. But if this is your forever home, or even a generational home to pass down to the kids and grandkids, then the "luxury" features will pay dividends down the road. Building costs seldom get cheaper.
Whoa! Thanks for the comments. I'm almost 50 myself but I like to think of myself as 35. I've been renovating houses since 2001 and built a great deal of the one I'm currently living in so I'm no stranger to hard labour. This layout might be something built at a workbench 6ft sections at a time and then set in place and joined up on a skeleton framework. Thinking of using spline for the nolix sections. To be honest, it's the block creation and wiring that has me most worried. A layout this size could easily eat up $5-6k in electronic controls if I'm not careful. Been playing around with Arduinos and sketches to control turnouts with mixed success. Block detection and signaling are possible, but complicated.
My excess cash and time go into mountain bikes. Can't sit still!
Wide staircases and doorways, couldn't agree more. My first houses were 100 year old and moving any furniture was tetris/physics/gymnastics all in one. NEVER doing that again.
Hi Matt & it's is Randy and i like yours video is Cool & Thanks Matt & Friends & Randy & Good Luck With Yours New Ho Scale Mushroom & Layout & Thanks Matt & Friends Randy
Hi Randy, thanks very much for watching! Take care
I love it. Running at scale speed, it could take the better part of an hour to go from staging to the farthest point. That would make for some nice op sessions. I'm thinking about a ramp system on my layout. I'm in a 10 x 13 room. The lower deck will be 40 inches high, the second deck would be 60 inches. I need to figure out if I can climb 20 inches in around 40 feet. 😊😊😊
Hi Paul. Thanks for watching again. I would seriously reconsider the 20 inch gap between levels if you can. I think you would be surprised at how 16 inches would suffice assuming your top deck is set back from the lower by 3 to 4 inches. I'd do a mock up using cardboard to check sight lines. If you're running consisted locos and you have a straight run, you could hide a 7% grade and get up to the second level real quick!
@mattw9667 All good point. I'm still planing.
Not sure if you said it but I would recommend doing the SOR on the green bit. Works as an end to end opp and could realistically come out of Hamilton if you branched off the Dundas somehow (or if you wanna push it just say it was never abandoned from Hamilton to Caledonia)
I had forgotten about that. Yes, I have a ton of gondolas specifically for bringing in slabs to the hamilton area for rolling. Cool opportunity to run my BNSF 2098 over the grand river too! Thanks for the tip!
@ idk how I forgot about the bridge but yeah that would be a cool feature. You don’t even have to go all the way to nanticoke, garnet yard would work as a good interchange too
Yup. I agree. Garnet yard in the country would fit perfectly on these narrow shelves.
@@mattw9667 totally, all these plans might make me throw up an new layout design my self hahaha
That's the spirit! Hahaha. Love how we all seem to be able to rip apart our hard work without a second thought!
I love this layout and the idea of not using helixes. That being said, I sense claustrophobia and excessive heat in the summer months. Can that be addressed? Also, what about safety issues should a fire break out?
Thanks for your comment. I plan on using SIPS for wall, ceiling, and floor of the house and i will have a white roof. The house I'm in now is 4 years old and we run the AC 3 to 4 times during the summer and on sunny winter days the furnace never comes on. Not worried about hot or cold. Fire, there will likely be a door by the office/work bench area. Too nice back there not to have the door open during summer days. It will defo be claustrophobic. Can't do much about that except focus on running trains!
Interesting, so when are you moving, new adventure coming your way
Early planning stages James. The move is only 50 feet away!
@ saw hwy 20 , just checking
I see that now. Interesting, my street must have been a major at one point