Gaugemaster - Scenic Slot Car Layouts

Scenic Slotcar Layouts
By Terry Smith
(See Terry’s Profile)

When I moved house 3 years ago I lost a home for my OO scale railway layout and, try as I might, there was just no place in the new house where it could fit in. It was stored for a while in the garage and although this was considered for its new home the fact was I needed to work in there as it is home to my 50 year old car. I felt it would be a too hostile an environment to house a scenic OO model railway. Then the penny dropped! A railway layout no, but what about my other modelling passion, slotcars?

The first thing was how much space I could use, being lucky to have a double sized garage (but with only a single door) the wall furthest from the parked car would be a start. As with railway layouts however, having one side up against a wall can give you problems with access, so a track plan in Scalextric was carefully considered using a long back straight, and utilising radius 4 curves onto and off of this straight. This was less likely to have the cars deslotting in the hardest to reach areas of the circuit, and had the added bonus of being able to run the cars at full chat down that 19ft wall!

The layout has been built on a framework that puts it almost 4ft high which visually looks better as you are looking more across at the cars racing rather than if you were viewing them from a helicopter. The space underneath can of course be utilised for storage of car bits, both 1:1 and slotcar! The circuit required the centre section to be 4ft wide and this utilised one whole 8x4 sheet of MDF. Two narrower pieces of MDF link the two wider end sections allowing one to reach any deslotted cars from these areas of the track. A track fitting test session confirmed that the circuit was OK and drivable and I though it was finally finished, then the scenery bug bit! But hang on! I thought I said that this was too hostile an environment for a scenic layout? Well maybe for model trains in 4mm scale, but this is in 1/32nd and being a racetrack its more open spaced therefore easier to keep serviceable. Anyway I felt that if I didn't do something scenic on these boards it would just become one huge workbench with bits of cylinder heads and carburettors lying all over it!

The most important thing, to bring a bit more reality to the circuit, was to raise the surrounding grass area up to the same level as the track, but how? I had a small piece of foam sheet that was used in some packing that was the right thickness (7mm) however do you think I could find a supplier? I'd just about given up when I spotted a possible alternative in my local Wickes store. It was in the form of large sheets of a cardboard type material that is used under laminate flooring, to my amazement it was 7mm thick. This stuff is ideal, being easy to cut, is cheap and easy to obtain and can be permanently stuck down using Deluxe DL11 Speed Bond glue. Laying it next to straight sections is simple enough but the curves need a bit more work, however the track acts as its own template and by carefully cutting round the edges with a sharp craft knife the material can be cut to fit any track shape.

Next was the grass itself, I used the Gaugemaster GM22 Autumn Grass Mat, I personally prefer this colour over the Spring or Summer mats, and this also is cut right up to the track edge and stuck down with Speed Bond. Then I hit my first snag: at 4ft wide I would not be able to reach the parts of the layout against the wall! This frustratingly meant that the circuit had to be disassembled and the baseboards unscrewed from the frame. I then had to work within the framework, modelling the areas on the (now loose) baseboard that would end up directly next to the wall.

It then occurred to me that if I wanted a backscene, now was the time to sort this out too. Various real life pictures of countryside and packed grandstands were obtained and then blown up and printed on A4 photo paper. These were cut out, and (to give some uniformity) stuck onto Peco PESK-19 clouded sky backscenes, which had themselves been stuck onto hardboard and mounted on the wall. Grassy banks were made up around the corners using polystyrene insulation tiles cut to shape and again covered in GM22 grass matting. Lichen was used to represent bushes and undergrowth, the Jordan pack JO70A has this in various colours, and trees are from the Faller range, FA181453 is a pair of what they call 'Roadside trees' which measure around 6" tall and there is an impressive Beech Tree FA181452 which is over 7.5".

This layout was never meant to be a serious all out attempt at scenic modelling but to give my 1/32 scale race cars somewhere to race other than on a carpet or loft floor, and I think I have ended up with a circuit that is great fun to drive on. Try and get your track off of the ‘terra firma’ if at all possible, your knee's will thank you for it, and I hope this article inspires some of you to think along the lines of building your own scenic racetrack. After all, end to end model railways have been built for years in minimum spaced areas, so not much is stopping one building a long thin race circuit down one wall. Avus anyone?