A few years ago a relative of ours very generously bought my (then) 3 year-old daughter a Brio railway set (specifically the 33097 Cargo Railway Deluxe Set). Over the last few years we've made up quite a few different layouts with it and (occasionally!) remembered to take the odd picture before dismantling it so we might stand a chance of rebuilding it again.
However, easy as pictures are, they're not the ideal for documenting track layouts. Being semi-capable with Inkscape I eventually decided it was about time I put together an SVG I could use to easily sketch a track layout in a nice, clean, printable format.
This repository is the result! The contents are as follows:
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template.svg-- this SVG may appear blank in preview but has all the pieces from the set we've got arranged around the outside of the "paper" and is my starting point for sketching a new track. -
map1.svg-- a recreation of the original design that came with the set (our original paper instructions disintegrated years ago!). -
map2.svg-- a design with two overlapping loops, one in a figure of eight passing over and under the bridge. -
map3.svg-- another design with two loops, and another figure of eight passing over and under the bridge. -
map4.svg-- quite a large two loop design with a tiny spur (because that's all the track we had left!)
You may note that on all our designs there's a certain "fudge factor". Brio's quite forgiving about pieces not fitting quite perfectly. Each of the designs here has been built successfully: we don't design stuff in Inkscape, then built it. Typically we play around building stuff first, then I quickly transcribe the design into Inkscape from the template, wonder how on earth it works in real-life given how far off the pieces inevitably wind up from "perfectly" fitting, fudge it around a bit until it sort of fits, then print that :)
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BRIO — the BRIO website (which seems to be dead at the time of writing, but hopefully that's temporary!)
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BRIO Wooden Railway Guide — an incredibly comprehensive guide to BRIO building including some very impressive Sketch-Up components and a whole section on calculating track layouts
Please feel free to fork this repository and make your own designs. I'd be happy to add to the available layouts (and potentially the templates if people want to derive / add templates for other kits). We may have to think about some better file naming conventions at some point, but I'm happy to make that a "future problem" for now!