Baseboard Materials

I don't know, none of them are my websites. Try a google search as sugggested if you want pictures.

No, and I made no claim otherwise, idiot. Our last layout was intended to be permanent, so it was essentially a narrow shelf design, with grid system benchwork/framing cantilevered off the wall studs. Like me to send you some pictures??? You might learn something.

Nothing innovative or unusual about what we're currently building, why re-invent the wheel?

1 x 4? Mine's built with 2 x 4 and 2 x 2, so it should last 40 plus years... although I may not. ;-)

Having trouble understanding the fact that using L girder construction means no accurate cutting is required. I and you do not need to cut accurately in order to build baseboards. L girder requires so little skill to get good results even Mark Newton the expert could do it.

I understood perfectly the first time, idiot. L-girder benchwork requires little or no skill, which is the reason you use it. It's ideally suited to someone of your meagre talents.

But as has been pointed out repeatedly by modellers whose experience goes beyond a permanent layout built into their home, L-girder is not really suited for lightweight portable layouts. Hence the growing body of literature detailing plywood "box-girder" - for the want of a better term - construction.

Your claims that lightweight ply construction require exceptional carpentry skills are like most of your other claims on any topic - they are pure bullshit.

Come and visit me, and I'll happily show you just how easy these methods are, and how wrong you are about them.

Hard to get hold of the PVA stuff (book binding glue) but its worth it I think.

Re baseboards I was in the merchant navy for years, which made modelling difficult, I play in N so I used to take away a few kits to play with. To test these on I had a single sheet of ply, cut to fit inside the lid of my suitcase with a 'layout' of peco set track laid on peco foam. Not sure that qualifies as a layout but it worked. I built a small layout (5' x 2' - the minimum to offer a decent hidden fiddle yard at the back) for home use but as the home was being virtually re-built when I was on leave it had to live in the under stairs cupboard To keep things light it was made from two sheets of thin play (about 4 or 5mm) on a simple but-jointed 'ladder' frame made from well seasoned 1" x 1". It worked fine, the track again used Peco underlay held down with evostick I think. The box construction meant it never warped. Later I added a nine inch hich ply strip along two sides and the back, these were glued and screwed to the inch by inch. That layout was passed to a kiddie some years ago and last I heard (a years or so back) it was used at christmas under a tree with the lone remaining working loco (out of three) trundling round. That was pretty lightweight but I still had to attack a handle to it so you could manouver it onto the coffee-table, ironing board or over the bath to play with it.

I was into military 1:72 for some time until the god son wanted a train set. The space was restricted vertically so I fitted spur shelving and used plastic covered chipboard (contiboard in the UK) which proved noisy and difficult to lay in the power leads and point control rods - I added a layer of the brown felt-like stuff used as an expansion insert in concrete (cellfoam is a fairly generic name for it) which made it easy to cut trenches to lay wires and wire in tube point control. This made a baseboard about an inch thick, with the spur supports at 15 inches it has lasted several years with no distortion despite having been moved and it currently lives in an unheated outside shed (it is now a 'battle board' for his toy soldiers).

Based on the above I am currently building a micro-layout for someone else on the ladder frame sandwich and plan to re-build the God son's layout for myself in my own shed using spur and contiboard. I may build another test track but I want to try using foam board for it (a bit like the ply construction discussed in this thread)

Both these methods are 'flat sheet' boards but the cellfoam gives me half an inch of depth, enough for streams and the like, screwing a strip of ply under a gap between two boards gives me a fraction over an inch, this can be dropped further using spacers under the main board.

Not sure this'll help but both methods do work

If you want to see a fully scenicked layout in a suitcase (originally one, now expanded to 3 suitcases) see

've seen this several times, and it is just amaZing!

Thanks - Impressive. One of the things that got me into N/2mm was a layout built in the 1930's. The lad had nowhere to have a permanent setup so he built one in a violin case, the top and bottom of the case were separated and joined at the end of the neck to provide and end-to-end layout - Mind you he had to scratch build everything and even had to make his own motor. More recently someone has built a 2mm scale layout that boxes up into a flight bag for travelling, after all no reason to be bored just because your'e on holiday!

Hmmm, we'll see:

Our test project! Still mostly guessing, but we hope to have trains running

8th/9th Nov... ;)

Pekka Siiskonen

My comment above was "tongue in cheek" ;-)

I wish you the very best of luck and management!

My concerns with the type of baseboard you are constructing are:

- noise transmitted within the expanded styrene. Only one type is readily available in New Zealand, I found it transmits noise badly as an almost metallic "hisss".

- fragile base when modules or sections are transported. The styrene does not handle the odd bump against doorways etc which always happen.

I only ever made the one experiment with styrene structure and reverted to my usual rigid wooden structure instead of experimenting further because I had suitable used timber (free) to hand.

I would be very interested to hear more of your experience as time goes by. What density of expanded styrene do you use?

Regards, Greg.P.

At a recent model train show in the USA, I saw what was billed as "the World's smallest scale model train". The scale was smaller than 1:900, and a layout with a circle of track was displayed on a 4"x4" (10cm x

10cm) base, complete with scenery. The loco and cars were barely 2cm long. They didn't actually have wheels running on rails; the train was diven by a belt below the track. Nevertheless, it would be quite a conversation piece for one's office desk.