The Andreasvik-Mattiasberg Layout
A Chewed Dogbone Layout

Scenario

Decided by the kids, I headed for a spectacular Swiss layout with alps, tunnels, bridges, waterfalls, cableway, port etc. Port in Switzerland? Yes, the city of Basel (Andreasvik on my layout) has a commercial port that uses the Rhein river for transportations to the sea. Several travels with various Swiss alpine railways, e.g. the narrow gauge "Bernina Express" on Rhätische Bahn (RhB) to St. Moritz in 2001, has also been of great influence, as well as the standard gauge Seetal Bahn. The old Swiss electric locomotives are beautiful!

With my first layout in the 70's, I was restricted by a table-tennis game, having about 20 cms of vertical space. I don't have this restriction now, so the mountains will be quite high and carry loads of snow. In my opinion, high mountains makes the layout look larger. By the way, I really like the winter.

The layout will be somewhere in Era III (1945-1970), or early Era IV. The "new" SBB logo was introduced in 1972! It is a beautiful Saturday early in May, some kids dare to swim in the lake, but we also got some snow in the alps during the night, and people go skiing. As I will model the northern part of Switzerland, some visiting German Trains will appear on the layout.

Layout Design

I started to look for layout design software, and found the shareware "Railways" (v4.0.0r2, for Microsoft DOS and later) by the French gentleman Sebastien Marchant. You are licensed to use the software for evaluation purpose without charge for a period of 21 days. After spending some time with Railways, we were on track. The enclosed layout map is, however, edited further with another standard desktop software. After finishing planning, I have tested "Raily" (v2.01, for Microsoft Windows) which now is available as an unsupported freeware. The current commercial version of Raily is v4.0 and 3D, however I really like v2.01 which is 2D only. Another alternative is "TrainCAD", a  freeware (Microsoft Windows) by our Norwegian neighbor Tor Sjöwall. On top of this, you will find several commercial software packages on the Internet.

Below, you will find the previous versions of my layout. You will see that the basic concept still is there:

The layout is located in a corner of the room. There are doors and other things that restricted us to have the layout around the room, by the walls. As the layout is 140 cm wide, as you see on the layout, I needed to add two areas  to enable access to all parts of the layout.

When designing the layout, I wanted to have an impressive scenery in the center. This is now where I have the main switchyard, with two levels of bridges above.

I have also tried to avoid having the tracks parallel to the layout edge. This can be tricky, as the Märklin M track geometry doesn't allow us to be too creative when it comes to curve radius etc.

The logic of the new layout is described in summary above. In the 70's layout (don't we learn from the history?), I had three circles of tracks where trains could run independent from each other. Impressive for the visitor, but not really a challenge for the driver. In this new project, there is only one - but quite long - single track with reversing loops at each railway station, we can call this a "chewed dogbone", as we don't have double tracks between the reversing loops. To maximize track length, the layout is structured in three vertical levels. This is why the layout map in the top of this page isn't that easy to understand... On its way from Andreasvik to Mattiasberg, the train is passing 5 tunnels and 5 bridges. It will run a distance of more than 20 m (63 feet) on its journey between Andreasvik and Mattiasberg, without running on the same track twice. Wow, is that much? Well, for a 4 m² layout, that is reasonable, but in real life, I wouldn't say that. In scale 1:1 the distance would be about 1.7 km. A little more than one English mile... 

Traffic

The main traffic idea is to take people from the city (and other areas) to the mountains for relaxing, skiing, partying etc. The service staff is commuting daily in large proportions. Considerable volumes of food, beer and wine is needed, large volumes are imported via the port. A mine and a furniture workshop is located in the mountains, exporting overseas. There is no road to Mattiasberg, due to bad conditions in the winter season, so we are really depending on the railway.

In the middle of the chewed dogbone (on the single track between the two reversing loops), there is a partly hidden Meeting Point with three tracks. To increase the variation in operation, trains can stop on each of the three tracks, and on the single track before and after the Meeting Point (in direction towards the Meeting Point). There may of course only be trains in four of the five locations, else we would end up in a deadlock. Passing trains have to queue, this will also provide enhanced realism, as it will take longer for the trains to run between the Andreasvik and Mattiasberg stations. The Meeting Point, as well as other operations, is managed by the digital system, further presented in the Digital Dummy section. Layout design softwares are great, but you will probably need to modify your layout in parallel to the testing of the tracks. Actually, my latest track modification (February 2003, in the Meeting Point) was decided after a test, running 5 trains simultaneously.