Geodesic Baseboards

Introduction

There are two problems with the traditional baseboards most people use for a model railway. Firstly their construction makes them heavy and difficult to move. The most common materials used are chipboard and softwood (usually pine). There are alternative materials which can be used, mostly for the baseboard top, which give a significant weight reduction but they can be expensive.

Secondly, traditional baseboards force you to join the flat earth society. If the whole top of the baseboard is at the same level as the base then the only direction the scenery can go is upwards. The builder is faced with the choice of either running trains across an un-prototypical flat plain which just looks 'wrong', or through a cutting where they can't be seen properly.

Both of these problems can be solved fairly easily once the builder takes the mental step of saying 'I don't have to do it the traditional way'. Here's how we solved these problems.

Fixing the Weight Problem

Think of a car. When the first cars were designed they had a chassis made out of girders which was designed to provide a rigid base to which the rest of the car could be bolted. There are still cars built this way today, probably the most common one being the Land Rover, although there are other examples.

Today, however, most mass production cars have what is called a monocoque chassis, this is made up of thin steel pressings which are welded together. The chassis derives its strength of the shapes from which it is made but its weight is made up of thin sheets rather than solid girders.

How can we apply this to a model railway baseboard? Well, first you forget the 2" x 1" (or even 3" x 1") side and cross members, these can be replaced with plywood. In our case we use 4mm thick WBP grade ply bought from the local DIY superstore.

Another major weight reduction becomes possible when you realise that it is not necessary to cover the whole surface of the board with chipboard. You really only need a flat surface where the tracks will run. If you do this you will save a considerable ammount of weight.

Leaving the Flat Earth Society

In reality, even a railway crossing a largely flat area is actually running along a very low embankment which has been set into a shallow cutting. It has to be built like this for various reasons, probably the most important one is so that the drainage works properly, this prevents the line being washed away in the next heavy rain storm. By only having baseboard top where the there are tracks you are already able to reproduce this situation but what if you then start to lift the trackbed up on stilts? Then you can actually build your railway on the top of an embankment and show your trains off to their full advantage.

How we built ours

The materials we used were:

4mm WBP grade plywood

We bought 8' x 4' sheets and cut them into 100mm wide strips using a circular saw.

12mm Medium Density Fibre Board

We bought 8' x 4' sheets and cut them into 100mm wide strips using a circular saw. This material is also used for the trackbeds which we cut to shape as required.

2" x 1" softwood Nogins

We bought this in 2.7m lengths and cut it in half on a band saw. We did this in such a way that the noggins have both 90 and 45 degree angles.

Fixing materials

We used a hot glue gun and a heavy duty stapler. We started with a fairly ordinary glue gun, we moved up to a heavy duty one, and eventually we bought one from Screwfix Direct which came with its own nuclear power station (moral: the hotter the better).

The next article in this series will explain (with photograhps and the drawings we worked to, just how we assembled our baseboards.