You may be looking at these pictures and thinking “hey, wasn’t he working on hand laid track with tie plates, what’s the deal with the Bachmann EZ-Track?” and I’d totally understand but I can explain.
As I mentioned in an earlier post I’ve been super busy painting the house (I negotiated today off) which means not getting train time and even before that I’d been itching to run some trains but didn’t have anything setup or anywhere to set things up. This is also part of the reason I built some bench work this month. I’ve been trying to decided what level of detail to go with, either plain hand laid or hand laid with tie plates like I’ve been working with on the speeder shed diorama. I haven’t reached a firm conclusion on which way to go, in part because I think my technique (lack of) is what’s causing my failures and frustrations. In the meantime I don’t want to wait to run things, and don’t want to handlay track and then rip it up if I do go with tie plates, or buy flex track and do the same. I do have this Bachmann EZ-Track though.
It’s actually track from some 7-8 years ago when I was just getting back into the hobby and I have a bunch of it that only gets used when I setup something on the floor for the kids. So I thought why not set up a temporary track that’s roughly what I want to build so I can run some trains and test out how it’ll operate.
See more posts about this project here.
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I still really like the idea of prototyping the plan using EZ Track. For it’s intended purpose it’s a good product and when it’s time has come for you it’s easy to pass along to another modeler who can use it.
I think it might buy some time in getting something up and running to prove the initial design. Also, it might help satisfy the need to run something while investing time in the skills to build track that you might prefer in the long run.
Nice idea.
/chris
I’ll probably have an upcoming post on this, so consider it a sneak peak :), but the problem I ran into is that the concept worked for me but I couldn’t really move forward because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do regular spiking or almost P87 detailed track tie plates etc but not P87 turnouts or P87 wheels etc.
I didn’t want to commit to standard hand laying and then end up with good success on my diorama and be disappointed I didn’t do the shelf layout that way. And I really didn’t want to do that and then end up disposing of all those ties when I re-did it with tie plates. So my current compromise is ME flex track lightly tacked down, that way I can do just about everything other than ballasting and when I decided how to proceed I can pull up a section of track, cut off the plastic ties and then hand lay it in the fashion I want but in the mean time I can put down road bed, have running trains, and start rough scenery and structures.
Thanks for the update. I think you’re really highlighting more of what I liked in the initial post.
Sticking down the EZ Track allowed you to think more about the next step which now looks like the ME track which in turn brings you closer to your grand vision. It’s all progress without stalling until you’ve reached that vision which is where I collapse each time.
Further, this is the magic of these scale of layouts (i.e. scale as in volume not HO scale) since the amount of materials required means that each step isn’t such a huge commitment.
Cheers
/chris
Progress without stalling is the idea, but I installed the EZ Track March 24th and I didn’t finally order flex track until last week. so I didn’t do a very good job of not stalling 🙂
As to the layout size that is absolutely true, I didn’t have to order a huge expensive box of track and I have the added economy in that I would have needed to order ME rail anyway.