Lay Your First Loop

A working circuit takes about four minutes and eleven pieces of track. Here is the order to lay them in, and the three mistakes that stop a beginner's first loop from running.

The default layout comes with track already down, which is useful for seeing what the game does and useless for learning how it works. Reset it, or buy a second table and work on the empty one. This is the shortest path from bare board to a train going round.

The shape to aim for

Not a circle. An oval with straight sides is easier to build, easier to extend and looks far better from the front edge, because the long straights give a train time to be seen.

Aim for something like this: two straights of four pieces each along the long axis of the table, joined by four curves at each end. Eleven to sixteen pieces depending on how generous you are with the straights.

Leave two tile widths between the track and the table edge. You will want that strip later for a platform, a road or a fence, and reclaiming it means moving the whole loop.

Lay the curves first

This is the part that is not obvious. Straights are forgiving — you can add or remove one at any time. Curves are not: four of them make a half-circle of fixed size, and that size dictates how far apart the two straights have to be.

So put down the four curves of one end first, then the four at the other, and only then connect them with straights. If you lay the straights first you will almost always find the curves do not meet them, and you will spend longer nudging track than you would have spent starting over.

Curves come in one radius. That is deliberate — a second, tighter radius was tried and removed, for reasons covered in the post about sweep radius — so the geometry of your ends is fixed and you are only choosing where they sit.

Press R more than you think

Rotation is the single most-used control in track mode and the one beginners forget. A curve has four orientations and only one of them continues the loop you are building. Hover, press R until the ghost lines up with the piece before it, then place.

On a phone there is no R key, so there is a rotate button in the header of the item panel. It does the same thing.

The three things that stop a loop running

A gap you cannot see. Two pieces that look joined from standing height can be one tile apart, because at that angle a one-tile gap is a few pixels. If a train stops dead at the same place every lap, drop the camera to desk height and look along the rail. The gap will be obvious from there and invisible from anywhere else.

A curve facing the wrong way. A loop that reads correctly at the ends but has one curve mirrored makes an S rather than a U. The train will run into it and stop. Same fix: look along the track from low down, where an S-bend is unmistakable.

No train on it. Track alone does nothing. Trains are placed like anything else, from the vehicle section of the catalogue, and they need to be dropped onto track rather than beside it. A train placed on the tabletop will refuse, and the placement will be rejected rather than silently doing nothing.

Then make it a railway

A loop that runs is not yet interesting. Three cheap additions turn it into something worth looking at, and none of them require more track.

A station on a straight. Stations belong on straights, both because a platform on a curve leaves a dangerous gap in real life and because a train stopped on a straight is a better silhouette from the front edge.

A level crossing where a road meets it. Lay a road across the track and the crossing gates appear where they cross. Watching the booms come down for a train is most of the reward of building a layout at all.

A second train going the other way. Two trains on one loop is where a railway stops being a toy and starts being a system. They will meet. Working out where to put a passing loop so they do not is the whole hobby in one problem.

When to add a switch

Not yet. Switches are the point where a layout stops being a circuit and becomes a network, and a network with one train on it is a network you cannot see working.

Get two trains running reliably on a plain oval first. Then add a siding off one straight, and the switch will immediately be doing something you can watch: taking one train out of the way so the other can pass. Added earlier, it is just a piece of track that sometimes sends your only train somewhere pointless.