The Guano Mine

or Layout in a Plastic Tote

by Fred Miller

When I retired it seemed that my hobby was clashing with my wife's and my hobby of full time RVing. We had sold our home, closed our business and bought a fifth wheel trailer and there was no longer any room for a layout. This was especially true of my love of narrow gauge O scale.

The solution came to me from a friend on the internet who made a challenge on the model train forum I frequent, www.2guyz.info . He also turned me on to the site ran by Carl Arnett, www.carendt.com . In these examples of micro layouts I seen a hope for myself to once again have a layout rather than building sheds and rolling stock for the box in the storage shed. My solution was at the local Walmart in the form of a large plastic 45 gallon storage tote.

The Tote

Even at 16 by 30 inches I felt the tote was too small for anything but really narrow gauge O, such as On18. Before I had once fiddled around a bit with On18 on my On30 layout as a diorama for a corner. I had done some research on bat caves and started a Guano Mine, but it had never got much beyond having the track laid on a rough frame of foam and ceiling tile. I had learned a few things about materials messing with this first diorama such as ceiling tile walls get heavy fast and 1 1/2 foam is plenty strong enough to use unsupported on small layout such as this.

So I built up a wall system from a rough design I had scribbled on a sheet of paper and then used thin strips of ceiling tile, around 1/2 inch thick, to build the rock walls. Breaking tile pieces this thin was a bit more difficult, but wasn't really harder than using other methods like plaster or carving foam with a cutter.

Lower Frame

I used N scale Atlas code 55 mainly because it has metal frog turnouts and I'm too lazy to handlay track. I felt the metal turnout was mandatory as I run a Bachmann N scale Plymouth mechanism under the shell built for me by good friend Drew Allison. It is one of the newer split frame mechanisms and runs many times better than the old one with the can motor did. It has never stalled on the powered metal frog. The rolling stock was scratch built by another great friend, Jim Marksberry, from N gauge car scraps and a crazy glue bottle. I was in a pinch getting the layout ready for its first train show and yet another friend turned the pizza cutter wheel flanges down for me as I was having trouble finding low profile wheels that fit the trucks. The cave walls were hand made using wallboard mud and my fingers. The building were scratch built by me from wood and/or cardboard except the engine shed which was originally a HO metal kit. I don't remember who made it. Detailing parts came from wherever. To really make the layout portable I recycled a 9.6 volt NiMH battery pack from a burnt out personal DVD player into the layout. The throttle was built using only 3 parts, a resistor, a potimeter, and a LM317T voltage regulator IC. The regulator can be purchased at most electronic hobby stores, like Radio Shack, and has directions on how to build a variable voltage supply from them on the package, so I will not get into that here. It runs at least 6 hours at 1/2 throttle as that's the longest I have ran it so far without a charge. I will run much longer I feel. So I can have both of my hobbies. The tote protects my layout from the weather. It stays outside under the trailer other than when traveling, when it rides in the rear of the truck bed still under the fifth wheel trailer. I can pull it out anywhere I travel and run on a picnic table or on top of a canyon wall equally well. Where ever I run it people come to watch. Now on to the next project. Maybe a layout on the trailer roof? Us modelers are never content.