WEB Site of 'Yves BROCHARD

DESCRIPTION OF MY LAYOUT

The 28^th November 1999 updated the 26^th January 2002

The afforded layout is the 4^th I built. His construction needed about 4 years. Anyhow it is still not finished! An extension is being added with turntable and goods trains station.

The table was made of floor wooden agglomerate panels 18 mm thick 2,01 m long and 60 cm wide, which have been laid on a wooden framework made of boards of 3 cm x 10 cm of section. The goods trains sorting area is 1,20 m wide and 5,70 m long and is connected to the former part with a table of 1,20 m x 2,50 m. The whole table is U shape. Such a solution will appear to some readers rather old fashion, but I wanted to be able to walk on the layout table to reach the peripheral edges of the layout. Moreover it was very easy to built the layout table according to such a solution.

The slopes are made of 8 mm plywood and doesn't exceed 2%. The mountains and slopes are carried out with a plywood framework on which is nailed a fine metallic netting. The netting is covered with newspapers rectangles about 10 cm x 10 cm which have been soaked into wood white glue (not diluted). To imitate the rocks I used a special mortar marketed by Faller. The meadows areas are painted with green acrylic paint, then covered with white glue paste and coloured sawdust from Faller bought in large pots.

For this layout I choose the ROCOLINE tracks system with plastic ballast. Taking into account the turnouts length the layout is made of 177 m of tracks including the goods trains sorting station (under construction). It has 39 turnouts including 30 units with great radius curves and 10° deviation and 7 units laid inside curves. Curves radius are not less than 82,4 cm (radius R9). They start with a radius of 196,2 cm (radius R20) to allow progressive curve.

The overhead system is the fine one manufactured by Sommerfeldt (http://www.sommerfeldt.de). It reproduces the 25 kV type of the SNCF. The overhead line is tight and is laid in zigzag like the reel one with crossing above turnouts. Although the wire are welded onto the supports of the masts, it is not very complicated to built

To simplify the wiring I have used flat 3 wires cables from Roco for turnouts and flat 4 wires cables from Brawa for the electrical supply of the tracks sections. These cables are fixed under the layout table with Roco fixations n° 10617 or 10618. This method allow a clean and fast wiring. I gave up the use of second hand telephone cables, which sheaths are to easy to damage and lead to many short cuts difficult to locate.

Houses and buildings come for most of them from Kibri. The models with a to visible plastic shape have been painted to provide more realism. The station for instance is a reproduction of the one of Köln in Germany. It was repainted pink for the facings out of brick and brown for the stone ornaments to imitate the sandstone of the Vosges. Some buildings come from Faller. But generally I prefer the products of Kibri, and more peculiarly for the half-timbered houses. A part of my Family comes from the East of France! The lighting poles come from Brawa. These company manufactures the finest lighting fixtures I know.

The layout is driven in his main part with a PC computer and the JAO system ( for more information on the JAO System:http://mywebpage.netscape.com/clubjao/homepage.htm). These area is made of 3 closed tracks with 2 of them which are parallel. With the six siding tracks which are hidden under the raised village, JAO controls 29 tracks sections. The access to these six tracks is fully automatic.

With such a JAO equipment about 18 trains are simultaneously controlled by the computer, and about 10 trains can run fully secure at the same time. The turnouts command is almost exclusively managed through routes (permanent or not) associated with trains running on the layout.

Yves BROCHARD

WEB Site of Yves BROCHARD

DESCRIPTION OF MY LAYOUT