Introduction

Several times over the years, Mr. Muffin began building an HO layout by buying wood and assorted tools and constructing bench work. In his homes in Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and twice in Indianapolis the bench work for the proverbial "Phase 1" was completed only to be torn down a few months later as he and his family were relocated for new job opportunities.

Shortly after the most recent move back to Indianapolis in November of 2002, Mr. Muffin began in earnest to assemble bench work once again - and with the able assistance of several "son muffins", often referred to as croissants and crumb cake, much was accomplished over the holidays in 2002.

In the Spring of 2007, the Muffins decided to start looking for a new house with more basement space, so the layout was disassembled and put in storage. A new house was purchased and the Muffins moved in August 2007. The new house has a much larger basement, but it is unfinished. They began finishing the basement, adding a workout / workshop room and a full bathroom. The rooms were finished before Christmas 2007.

Through these pages, the Muffins will share their progress once layout construction commences.

Here's a link to a page where we have pictures posted of our various building flats and structures with more to come so check back often:

Building Flats and Structures

Here's a cool sequence of shots we shot while the Grand Muffins were visiting for the weekend on August 16, 2009....

The steamer is the Western Maryland 2-8-0 Consolidation pulling a coal drag:

MTH Premier Western Maryland 2-8-0 Consolidation

The Hudson pulling the Big 4 Passenger Train....

Here's a few more shots of the bridges:

Bridge Solutions 5' Bridge

Scenic Express Girder Bridges 1

Scenic Express Girder Bridges 2

Scenic Express Girder Bridges 3

"Houston, We have landed" - we have both DCS and TMCC running on all tracks

I was having all kinds of problems with DCS - okay and some of them were do to some wiring mistakes, but even when I got that resolved the DCS signal was terrible and the different tracks were getting lots of signal interference. Following the advice of MTH's documentation and the wizards on the OGR Forum I went to radio shack and bought 28 volt light bulbs and bayonet mounts for them and wired them on the track side of the TIU. Like magic all of my issues with the signal disappeared. We're running version 4.02 of DCS now and have some issues adding new engines, but I just delete the incomplete adds and add them over and that seems to work.

In terms of scenery, we are working on the building flats in the background first and are about half done. Still a lot more to do, but this is how it looks so far:

Southwest Corner - Three track upper level.

West side of North wall.... we added 6 additional floors to the REA building.    

Planning is for sissies 

Blah Blah Blah.... All of these people talk about planning their train layout. Seems like some people plan and don't ever build.  I just started cramming bench work in until we could hardly walk around, and then decided okay we must be able to get some kind of train layout in here.

Okay - well not exactly. From the track planning books; talking with people on the OGR Forum, and our previous layout experience, we knew that generally we wanted an around the wall design rather than an island design - while it would limit the walk ways some it would give us much longer track runs. Like the old layout we would have a lower level and at least one upper level. The upper level would be the main focus - lots of bridges and background scenery.

For the lower level we decided on a folded dog bone 2 track mainline - with a lengthy section where the loops would run side by side giving us a four track wide area for photos and runbys. We thought we could do a 3 track mainline but it just got too crowded.

Then we just started laying out track; making adjustments and finally screwing it all down. In most cases the geometry worked out great. In a few I had to make some adjustments.

Here's a hand written copy of "the plan" though we documented it after we got all of the track down:

Send mail to mrmuffinstrains@att.net with questions or comments about this web site.  

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Last modified: 12/31/11