Full-size paper templates for laying out roadbed
al way of transferring measurements from a scale drawing to full-size pieces. These often lead to erasing and re- drawing lines on the plywood from in- correct measurements or curve plots, cutting out wrong shaped or sized pieces, or cutting along the wrong line on the plywood, thus wasting wood and time. The finished roadbed pieces will be as accurate as your original scale layout drawing. Drawing the roadbed sections to full scale and using the print-outs elimi- nates do-overs and return trips to the lumber yard for more plywood since we found the fit of the track center lines from piece-to-piece to be dead-on. You can throw out your radius bar, protrac- tor, square, pencils and markers, tem- plates,
astrolabe, divining rod, and knee pads if you use this method. The following is how to do it.
The roadbed templates (below and right) are shown as details on the 4′-0″×8′-0″ plywood pieces. At this point everything looks like a giant puzzle, but the labels on each section are keyed to the original lay- out drawing, and that will keep things or- ganized. The big blue arrow points out the centerline of the track. That will be needed when the flex track is laid. “Waste” areas can be reclaimed for other layout uses.
Layout plans and file prep Rough out your track plan with
sketches but do the final plan with a computer design program. (You can put an awful lot of track and buildings into a given space with a pencil, so proving out the track centers, clearances, radii, and turnout sizes will pay off in the long run.) I drew up the plans using CorelDraw® Illustrator®
. Others may prefer Adobe or one of the many CAD
drawing programs. As with most lay- outs, this starts with a drawing of the
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track center line. As long as you use a vector-type graphic program and not a bit map-based one, file sizes should re- main manageable.
Early in the project we wanted to know how much lumber and plywood to order when we started construction. I had made a layer in the drawing file to show the form and dimensions of the roadbed pieces we would need, as well as another layer with scale 4′-0″×8′-0″ rectangles for the sheets of plywood. I worked out a cutting guide for the pieces
on this last layer, moving the sections around to get the best use of the wood. Things appear pretty simple when view- ing just track center lines, but multiply- ing that times the number of pieces of roadbed and multi-track sections means cutting plywood would be a very large and tedious chore. This is when we de- cided to use full-size templates. The printer’s preferred digital graphic file format for input was Adobe .PDF, and I prepared a CorelDraw file for each of the six sheets of plywood
AUGUST 2012
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