I really like model trains. I’ve mostly used wooden rails and I wanted to make a layout with HO trains. We also wanted something that wouldn’t take up a lot of space on the floor of my bedroom. This is the story of how we built my HO Scale Train Table. Before we started any building, we looked at some videos of some train layouts in rooms.

Here are some of the ideas we considered:

What I liked about this is that it was up on the wall, but the problem with this design is that I it’s hard to change the layout once you’ve built it.

This idea is very cool because its like an elevator. The big problem is that we’d have to cut open the ceiling to get the wooden beams and we’d have to run an electric line to the winch system.

I liked this design because it will hide the trains so no one can see them. This will also give me more room in my bedroom. The problem is that it might be hard to lift up and down and we also need to make sure that the tracks don’t fall when they are in the up position.

We decided to go with this design and I guess we will have to solve these two problems.

So next we drew a blueprint for the table .

With our design decided, we got down to work. The first thing we needed to do was get the lumber.

Then we measured it.

These 2″x 2″ and 2″x 4″ pieces will be used for the main frame.

Once the measurements were made, we cut the pieces.

When using electric power tools, it is important to wear goggles because sawdust might get in your eyes.

With the pieces cut, the next step was to drill the pieces of the frame together with screws.

Here is the completed frame. to make it stronger we added metal braces in the corners.

We then added a frame of 1″x 6″ pine around the 1″x2s”.

To support the frame, we added a hinge that was attached to a wood base that was screwed into the wall and the floor.

Then we added the legs to the hinged frame.

Here is the frame in the up position.

Now it was time to paint it!

After we painted the frame, we added 1/4″ plywood sheets the would serve as the trackbed.

And we painted them too.

We also added more sheets to the bottom to hide the frame.

Once they were added, we painted the underside of the table.

The next challenge was how to create a system to lower and lift the table. We decided to use pulleys. A pulley is simple machine the makes work easier. You might wonder how it does that and what do we mean by work? Well, work is a force moved through a distance. So anytime you lift something, you are doing work. The equation for work is

Work = Force x Distance or W=FxD

I can’t just lift the table up by myself but, a pulley can help. Here’s why:

(BIG FORCE)(little distance) = work = (little force)(BIG DISTANCE)

Fd=work=fD

What does this mean for my train table? So I can apply a small force to the pulley over a long distance and the pulley can apply a big force to the train table over a shorter distance.

This block and tackle pulley that we bought has a mechanical advantage of 5. This means for every 1lb that I apply it will produce 5lb of lift. The price I have to pay is that I have to pull 5ft of rope to lift the table 1ft. You can see this on the pulley below that has 5 ropes that will support the table and one rope that I will pull.

The pulley came with 40′ of rope, which was not enough. 40′ would only allow us to lift something 8′ so we needed a longer rope. A 100′ should do it.

Here’s the pulley with the rope attached.

And here’s the pulley system and the train table in action!

The final touch!