Layout Design
I am hopeing that the members of this forum can help me. I have been asked to help (eg: do all the work) on building a H0 German outline layout. As for more years than I care to remember been working in 0 scale, and narrow gauge this project is somthing of a challenge!. ( I have worked as opperator on H0, N 00 & other scales) My questions are: Can modern full lenght stock run happily on 26" (660mm) radius curves? If that is OK can double track be used, at what centres?. What is the vertical clearence needed? (I am guessing at 3" / 76mm) And, would a 7.5foot (2286mm)run be long enough to get that clearence? Rest assured there will be more questions, because the owner wants to be able to run DCC & analoge. Thanks Trevor

Virtually all* modern mass produced European coaching stock will run around approximately 440mm radius curves, but to compensate for the unsightly overhang you'll probably have to increase the distance between parallel tracks. For example with Roco GeoLine, the track radius is 434.5mm, and the next radius is 511.1mm, giving a track spacing of 76.6mm. In general the greater the radius the more realistic things are going to look, and the closer parallel tracks can be, so I don't think you'd have much problem in terms of operability if you had a minimum radius even as low as 24"/600mm; the issue is more whether or not you can live with the amount of overhang your stock will exhibit when going around the curves, or the excessive distance catenary masts (if you have them)have to be placed away from the rail side to allow clearance for the stock. *I can't think of any coaching stock that wouldn't, except perhaps Liliput's model of the coach to accompany wide loads... and the only freight stock that might cause trouble are the Maerklin/Trix or Liliput "tragschnabelwagen".... which would probably be fine on prototypical radii (ie 1/87 of the real thing) but probably a step too far for most model layouts.

Thanks for that info Andrew. As I said I am building this layout for some one else, trying to utalise as many of his ideas as pratical, given the space constraints of his room. Do you have any thourghts on vertical clearence , and graidients? Trevor

Hi Trevor, How big a layout are you looking at building? Is it for home use or display? Do you want to model a real location or just have a Germanic feel? Do you want a station area or are you happy to just have trains run through a scene with hidden storage yards behind? Do you want to "drive" the trains or just have it run automatically? Cheers John