GeoTrax Track Layout Ideas - Part I

Designing a track layout is part art and part science. I remember when we bought our first GeoTrax set, the Tracktown Railway, my wife kept saying, "Don't throw the box away, we need it as a reference to put the track together."

Once you add a few sets to your collection, you quickly out grow the basic layouts and are left to your own creativity. Once I found a few resources on the web, I was able to convince my wife to release her security blanket (the box), and let her creativity flow.

I am happy to report she has become quite the designer or her own original and creative railroad track layouts. The next few posts will focus on some resources available to help any of you who are stumped to get going on creative track layouts.

First a little inspiration...queue the Zydeco music...

(Press the play button (2 times) in the center of the image to play the movie.)

Credit: YouTube user EricTimothyJessen Special Thanks to Matthew, Eric, Chad & Blake for creating this!

Fisher-Price recognized the need and added some track layouts to their site. These can be hard to find in Google because of all the flash animation that FP uses on its website. No worries, I have creative a comprehensive list of the links for you here, enjoy!

Beginner Track Layout #1
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View)

Beginner Track Layout #2
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View)

Intermediate Track Layout #1
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View)

Intermediate Track Layout #2
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View)

Advanced Track Layout #1
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View)

Advanced Track Layout #2
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View)

Expert Track Layout #1
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View, Step-by-step Instruction Sheet (PDF))

Expert Track Layout #2
(Printer Versions: Basic (Overhead) View, Enhanced View, Step-by-step Instruction Sheet (PDF))

Or, for those who yearn for simpler times, here are the Tracktown Railway Track Layouts I mentioned earlier in this post.

A Complete, Online GeoTrax Checklist

I found this site recently that has a couple great resources you should now about. The first is a Complete GeoTrax Checklist. The list is color-coded indicating what collection the set is a part of, pictures, part numbers, descriptions and MSRP.

If you want you can get a printable copy of the GeoTrax checklist in PDF format (item picture and name only). The list is up to date including the recent Big City sets.

From the checklist page you can also link to a list of all the GeoTrax Instruction Manuals. The site is well done, it also comes with a discussion forum and some news about GeoTrax.

I do have one request...I wish the owner of the site would open the discussion forum for browsing without signing in. Search engines would have access to a lot more content that could be indexed which would only increase traffic to the site making for a larger community of contributors. Anyway, have a look and see what you think.

Craigslist - Another great place to buy GeoTrax

Do you want to get a good deal on GeoTrax...have you tried http://www.craigslist.org. If you are unfamiliar with it, it might not look like much at first but this is a great and free classified ads system.

Choose the State and then City in which you live, then off you go. Try a number of different search terms individually as many people are less careful about the keywords they use in their ads.

I suggest trying things like geotrax, geo trax, geo tracks, fisher price train and any others you can think of.

They also give you an RSS feed that you can plug into your favorite RSS reader so you will notice right away when new items are posted.