In the middle of building a 4x8 ez track layout that's got a side for rail fanning and a side for switching. You cannot view this attachment.You cannot view this attachment.
The engine is a mantua 4-4-2 kitbash with a 2-8-0 Bachman boiler.  It like the rest the layout is a work in progress. I need to figure out how to get the steps for the pilot or craft something up.

Take it easy
Jay

Thanks for sharing, Jay! Looks great so far.

It looks like from the door in the background with the light coming around the edges, and the single layer of vertical exterior boards on the studs, that your layout is in a nonconditioned space with possibly no heat or air cooling, possibly a barn of some sort.

Please elaborate if this is the case.  I ask because I have a layout in a covered but open-air space and am especially interested in the experiences of others that have with such a situation.  Especially how you deal with temperature extremes.

Yeah the layout is in the loft of a detached garage/barn.  The track, engines, MRC transformer, and the majority of the buildings have been up there for 7 or so years waiting for me to get the hankering to get the layout going again.  I'm not sure how the scenery will fare but the rest of it has been ok.  I'd say I have to clean the track more often than if it was in my house.  Also I'm running dc blocks so I'm not sure if DCC would be as happy with the temp swings etc.  My biggest fight has been trying to keep the rodents off the layout and out of the barn in general.  As such the engines tend to stay sealed up if I'm not running them but until I'm an empty nester that's where the layout will be.

Take it easy
Jay

Thanks Jay. My layout is in a covered but open air space under a raised house two blocks from the Gulf of Mexico.  A good many of the days of the year it's either too hot or too cold to operate the layout.  The salt air from the Gulf makes track cleaning a daily requirement so I'm not going to build a very large layout because of the maintenance time.  But  DCC works fine.  At the end of every operating session, I pack the locomotives, cars, and DCC command station away in closed containers.

We are adjacent to swampy Woods so we have a rat problem that won't go away because they come out of the woods to visit us, and they are up on my layout at times.  That means I can't build any scenery with any absorbent materials. The humidity is another reason not to build any scenery because lichen absorbs the humidity like a sponge.

But I'm able to run a railroad despite all this. I'm using plastic road bed track similar to Bachmann's track and it's held up very well down there.  I put some plastic structures out as well and I'm having a fine time with my layout down there as long as the temperature is tolerable.

Yeah I'd been reluctant to add scenery for awhile but figured it would be fun to get it going and share with my teenagers before they move out.  Once they move out I'll probably build a new table for it in the house and move the track, buildings etc inside so I've avoided gluing anything down track or structure wise at this point.

Some of my daughters handiwork paint wise She took care of the buoys and the boat painting.

I only use plastic structures on this layout.  Since I'm modeling a rural branch line, there aren't too many to begin with.

With the rats depositing everything they deposit on the layout, I've decided to make a few sections of scenery on removable pieces of cork road bed. And if the rat defiles it irreparably, I'll just throw it away and start over.  Fortunately, we've managed to eliminate most of our rodentia brethren in an aggressive campaign, but they will always be there in the swamp right behind the house so we have to stand ready.

When I first started this layout, about a third of it was EZ track I had left over from a long-ago project, and combined it with various pieces of flex track and snap track. But I had a lot of problems making it all level and with rail joiners failing electrically, I ended up pulling it all up last year.  I never liked code 100 rail, but I already had it so I used it.  Now that it was gone, I had my chance to use code 83 track, so I got some with plastic roadbed very similar to Bachmann, but much better looking with the code 83 rail.  I spray painted it all brown and it looks really good.

The issue is that we're probably going to move out of this house in two years and I'm reluctant to ballast this track, which will glue it all together, when right now I can take it all apart and take it all with me, since it's a pretty sizable monetary investment.  I won't be able to give it the branch line look I want, but I am able to run trains pretty effectively.

To those who have no layout space inside, but have some suitable exterior area like I do, I say that it's possible to do HO outside, but you have to be ready to meet a number of challenges.

Incidentally, the main layout that doesn't get run much anymore is almost all EZ track, buried deeply in ballast to conceal the code 100 rail.

I'll probably ballast the track at some point.  I don't mind the code 100 rails since I've got a few older engines with larger flanges I don't want to turn down. I think I only have two gripes with ez track.  One is the road bed height and needing to elevate all the structures higher than standard HO road bed.  The other is feeling like you need to limit your elevations to being flat.

Yes, the road bed height of EZ track is one of my main issues with it. It's higher than the standard atlas Cork Road bed that's been around for a couple of hundred years or so.  But I suspect they did that to clear the mechanisms under switches. Nevertheless, it's difficult to align EZ track with the other sectional track installed on top of standard cork Road bed.  This eventually caused loose rail joiners and subsequent electrical failures over time and is what precipitated the removal of my previous EZ track  on my outside layout.

I think most of the cork roadbed is made by Midwest, rather than Atlas.

Len

Whatever.  Heights established decades ago don't match with plastic roadbed sectional track.

I enjoyed the photos...nice work...thanks

I don't mind Ez track, its well made and at my age now its so much easier then flex track and roadbed. Its also widely available and reasonably priced.
I'm building a new layout that is about 13x5 and right now I need it to be easy to build, wire and run trains.
Over the years I have many layouts using all the accepted methods of laying track but now is not the time and ez track will be sufficient on this next layout, it should be fun.

Dave

Yeah it's held up well can't complain about it durability.  Here's a more recent update.