The White River and Northern Model Railroad: Clinic

	The N Scale

	Model Railroad

The World's Smallest Functional Layout?

This may be one of the crudest looking layouts you've ever laid eyes on, but before you pass such harsh judgment on it, take a guess at how big it is. You probably would not think that it's all of about a half-inch across the front. I nicknamed it the Sceniced and Ridiculously Small Railroad (in homage to Rick Spano's Sceniced and Undecided).

Track plan In N Scale, the layout measures four by eight feet. And... it works. The train travels around the layout in either direction. It passes through a tunnel, through a bridge, past an illuminated passenger station, water tower, factory, and two houses. Plus trees, telephone poles and cars. Not to mention a waterfall and a river.

To see the layout in a setting that will clearly illustrate its size, scroll all the way down to the end of this article for a view of the layout held between my fingertips. You'll see that it's smaller than a thumbnail.

Layout Construction

The whole mechanism The layout was built from the mechanism up, starting with the key ingredient: the oval band that moves the train. Luck was with me as my search for a suitable material brought me to a drawer of small electrolytic capacitors. Grabbing one at random, I sliced off a segment of its wrapper, and voila! Just what the doctor ordered. Even better, when looped around a pair of brass tubes, it formed an oval that fit perfectly within a scale 4 by 8 foot rectangle.

The mechanism that turns the loop is comprised of a pair of drums rotated by a geared micromotor. Both drums had to be powered and exactly parallel to one another in order to keep the loop from wandering. To achieve this, a frame was created by cementing two brass plates together with CA and drilling holes for the drum shafts. After separating and cleaning, the plates were clamped to opposite sides of a half-inch thick spacer block, and brass tubes were soldered into the holes. Then the excess material was cut away to produce the finished frame.

After the mechanism was fully completed, functional, and run in, the layout itself was created. First, an oval that exactly matched the shape of the loop was cut from a piece of .020 sheet brass. Then this shape was traced onto another piece of brass, and the oval area was removed, plus an allowance of approximately .008 inch for the "fingers" that hold the rolling stock.

The tunnel isn't just for show; it actually holds the two layout pieces in precise alignment to form the continuous oval slot. The layout parts were attached to a flat surface with double-stick tape, and the tunnel, a length of .060 brass C-channel stock, was soldered to them. Then the finished tabletop was secured to the mechanism frame directly above the loop.

Track and Rolling Stock

Track is nothing more than dark brown paint applied with an 18/0 brush along each side of the slot; light gray stripes alongside the brown ones represent ballast.

Rolling stock is comprised of a locomotive (an F7A Phase II, NYC #4959—just kidding), three boxcars and a caboose. To fabricate them, a slot was carved into the edge of strip styrene with the tip of a sharp knife to accept fingers made from strips of thin sheet acetate. After bonding all five fingers into the slot, the strip stock was cut into car lengths and colored with felt-tipped pens. Then the fingers were inserted through the track slot and bonded to the loop with CA.

Scenery and Backdrop

A pair of rugged, wooded mountain peaks rise up over the tunnel, dramatically bracing a grand waterfall—all made from a small blob of Squadron putty applied to the layout and shaped with the tip of a knife, then painted green. Rock faces are gray paint with an ink wash, the waterfall is white paint, and the river is blue paint. And the trees? Individual bits of fine ground foam adhered with white glue.

The backdrop is a 3 by 8 scale foot rectangle of .020 sheet styrene painted sky blue. Clouds were created by scratching off the paint with a knife, and shadows were added with pencil. The backdrop is glued to the back of the brass tunnel channel.

Structures and Details

The imposing station is illuminated to catch the eye and draw attention to the layout. An axial lead microbulb, which forms the bulk of the structure, was bonded directly to the layout surface (the scenery hides the wires, which run over the tunnel and out through a notch in the backdrop). The back and ends of the bulb were painted black to block the light, and the front was painted white to diffuse it. The building facade is a scrap of etched brass fence trim bonded to the bulb with CA, and the roof is two pieces of strip styrene shaved with a knife to form peaks.

Other structures include a water tower (brass wire), a factory (two bits of strip styrene and a wire smokestack), and a pair of houses (strip styrene with ends trimmed to points).

The layout features a through truss bridge, which is made from a single piece of etched brass fence folded into a U shape and chemically blackened. Other details include a plate girder road bridge, five autos, and fifteen telephone poles, all snippets of etched brass. Since store displays are often more toy-like than realistic, the crude, oversized details do not tend to detract from the layout's effect.

Wiring and Control

The power supply is a penlight battery, and the "throttle" is a DPDT switch. The micromotor and microbulb are wired in parallel to the same supply.

Operation is more fun than you might think, at least when you have visitors: Turn it on and watch the dropped jaws and wide-eyed stares of disbelief.

A World Record?

The purpose of building this was to create a scene detail, not set some world record. But then I found an entry published in the Guinness Book of Records indicating the smallest layout as having been built by Bob Henderson of Ontario, Canada, to a scale of 1:1,400, with a 3/16-inch long locomotive. At somewhere around 1:12,000, mine is proportionately almost ten times smaller, but I'll never know if it's an official record-breaker, because when I applied, apparently they weren't interested since they never answered. I also contacted Model Railroader magazine to see if they wanted to publish this article—they weren't interested, either. I guess the Sceniced and Ridiculously Small Railroad just isn't very interesting. Funny, almost everyone who's seen it has exclaimed either "You should be in Guinness!" or "You should write an article!" Well, at least I could do something about the latter, so here it is.

By the way, this is one of two such layouts I've built. The first was a "proof of concept" prototype that is slightly larger and considerably cruder than this one, which now resides in a hobby shop window on Rick Spano's Sceniced and Undecided. I did all of the fabrication without the aid of any magnification. Although my eyesight is not what it used to be when I made them back in 1998, I am still planning on making three more functional micro-layouts: One will be another store display about two-thirds the size of this one; another will be a club layout about the size of a matchbook, with multiple trains being operated by a bunch of N Scale club members; and the third will be a backyard garden layout that is being photographed for a model magazine (the photographer's camera flash will work).

Website of the Week

The Sceniced and Ridiculously Small Railroad has been named "Website of the Week" by 2 Guyz and Sum Trains Dot Com for the week of 2 July 2007. Thanks, Guyz!

Image specs: All of these images were taken with a Canon 20D digital SLR and a 50mm prime lens with a 36mm extension tube for the two super close-ups. Illumination was a 250-watt halogen lamp. For maximum sharpness and depth of field, the lens was stopped down to f-22. The only processing done to the images was silhouette cropping and drop-shadow effects. Illustrations were rendered in CorelDraw version 9.

See the layout running! | Watch it on YouTube

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