Here's a thought. Would the noise or vibration of trains running be dampened if, say I placed a chunk of rubber between the layout legs and the floor and between the layout and where it's attached to the wall?
May layout is going to be in the attic and I just had this thought while envisioning the sounds traveling through the studs into the rooms below as my Branchville local makes the rounds.
Dave
Well, it can't hurt but I don't think it will make a big difference. The benchwork itself will be sufficient for making noise if there isn't something under the track to dampen it, like (sealed) Homasote on 3/4" plywood. And you could put cork on top of the Homasote.
-John
I find that noise is more feared and imagined to be bad than reality. Just walking about in the room often is a lot louder than the actual noise from a train moving along. I'll also note that running a train at 100smph is a lot louder than running it at a much more scale 50mph for a passenger train. Just getting rid of the large plywood pieces and using small roadbed curves and straights will deaden the sound a lot from the tabletop setup. If I had to put isolation anywhere on the layout structure, it would be at the bottom of the legs and on any ties to the walls.
-- Bob May Losing weight is easy! If you ever want to lose weight, eat and drink less. Works evevery time it is tried!
Bob, Would tacking up some of that bubble packing stuff under the layout help? I've never been bothered by noise much. Since using a spline sub-roadbed I've notice that the layout is more quiet than the ones in the past. I've never really thought about it much. Bruce.
The noise is more of a mechanically transmitted one to places that will resonate to it. Thus, the addition of bubble pack won't really cure anything. The addition of foam firmly glued to the underside will probably do the job as this is a mass that will dampen the resonance of the large resonating areas. I've been using spline roadbed for so long that I've never considered the little noise that comes up from the railroad - mostly ticking noises from railjoints and rumbling from the rolling wheels - to be that bad. Occasionally when I see another layout, the noise does get to me but that is often loud poorly maintained locos or those locos which are just loud. In addition, the locos that I run are pretty quiet for two reasons, they are made quiet and they don't get run at full speed where the unbalances of the motor and so forth don't get going badly. Those loud railroads also seem to be of the more flat variety which means that the plywood central version of making a layout really is loud, even with the cork roadbed.
-- Bob May Losing weight is easy! If you ever want to lose weight, eat and drink less. Works evevery time it is tried!
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