BEGINNER’S GUIDE: Choosing a location

Designing your layout requires more than simply building the baseboards and adding track. Hornby Magazine starts at the beginning and explains how to find the perfect location to build your dream railway in your own home.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS, decisions. You will quickly come to realise that before you can lay a single piece of track or cut timber that you need to give much thought to a combination of factors such as the type of layout you’d like to build, the era, scale, size of baseboards and where to house it.

Layouts can be designed in all manner of shapes and sizes from simple continuous loops to figure-of-eight and multiple loop combinations, as well as end-to-end station and yard schemes in straight, ‘L’ shaped or ‘U’ shaped configurations. But even before you can decide on what type of layout you are going to build, you need to choose where it will be built as that will dictate the space available and influence your choice of scale, location and – perhaps - era.

Choosing a Location

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