Designing and Building Multi-Deck Model Railroads

Tony Koester has written a half-dozen books focusing on his life-long hobby of model railroading. Tony is the editor of Model Railroad Planning, a special annual issue of Model Railroader magazine, as well as a contributing editor to MR. He writes MR’s popular Trains of Thought column and has written numerous feature articles for MR. He also served as the editor of Railroad Model Craftsman magazine until 1981. Tony spent a quarter of a century designing, building, and with his friends, operating a freelanced coal-hauling HO railroad, the Allegheny Midland (the Midland Road). More recently, he has been hard at work on a multi-deck HO layout that accurately depicts the Nickel Plate Road’s St. Louis Division as it appeared in 1954.

Introduction 	4

The evolution of layout design 	6
 Looking up instead of out

Do you really need more than one deck?     12
Longer runs enhance operations

Design considerations	24
Developing a track plan

Climbing between decks 	38
Helixes, continuous runs, and elevators

Height compromises 	46
Factors in determining ideal levels

Layout lighting 	56
In a word, “fluorescent”

Don’t let the top infringe on the bottom    66
Avoiding clearance issues

Construction techniques 	74
Assembly order is critical

Framing the picture – fascias and valances     80
Framing the view of the layout

Multi-deck layout sampler 	88
Examples of successful layouts