This is an idea that has always interested me as well. I'm also a big trout fishing fan, however not a very good one.
There's a rainbow trout tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California that I love. I actually just took a picture of it last week that I'd like to post but my home PC crashed out and I can't uploading it to my webserver from the laptop. If anyone is interested in seeing it, email me @
MidniteRPS13@aol.com
The tank is a paludarium setup and the water is ice cold. The water flows over a little waterfall into the display tank which is pretty deep, probably about 5ft, but the footprint doesnt really seem that large, maybe 4ft, I'd need to look at th pics again. The fish don't swim laps or anything they just hang out in the strong current like running on a treadmill or a hamster on a wheel.
Think about most times you see a trout in a stream. They're just hanging out swimming in the current until an insect gets thier attention and then they eat it. I think a long tank at least 2ft deep with some large river rocks, as well as a substrate of several different grades of river rock, with a heavy current moving in one direction produced by powerful pumps and powerheads would be satisfactory. The larger river rocks would provide pockets of water where the current was being deflected, this would be a spot where the fish might rest if it found it nessesary.
These large rocks could be made out of styrofoam and concrete as part of a 3D background(a topic I'm not going to get into here) which would be hard like stone and any shape or form you'd like.
I don't think you could get away without a chiller though. The fish would really like a cold tank. This would also probably cause a lot of condensation on the glass which I noticed a lot of when visiting Sea World that has a Golden Trout Tank. Sorry, no pic of that tank. I can get one next time I go, maybe in a few weeks.
Anyway, this reply is already too long so I'll wrap it up but I want to touch on size real quick. Trout, specifically rainbow can get to sizes well over 20lbs. This can be almost 2 feet long. For a more natural setting you'd want to have smaller fish. Trout farms would probably be willing to provide you with fish and you could just release them into your local bodies of water where the farms make their drops or maybe even return them back to the trout hatchery. Another option would be to have a trout pond and retire your trout into the pond when they got too big for the tank. I'd suggest using native species and only releasing if it would be legal to do so.
The least popular solution would be to eat them when they got too big. So sad, yet so delicious. I'm j/k, I'd hope you wouldn't eat your pets.