Thanks to all for your
Thanks to all for your comments.
I decided to eliminate the pit, and excavate another one beside my coal empties' return track. I doubt if this arrangement matches prototype practice, but 99% of the people who see it and operate on it don't know the difference - so it works for me!
There are always compromises in layout design, particularly in tight places. The elevator trackage is the most obvious in this plan, but there are others (see below).
All the layout designs I've done have, either to a lesser or greater degree, are designed around footprints of specific structures.
For a large custom design, I usually don't have time to research and incorporate particular kits. But when the client has specific kits or built-up models, or the space is really tight, we have to spend the time incorporating specific footprints. It's a lot more challenging than drawing in a few tiny generic boxes and calling them "industries" (as one sees on many published plans), but it's especially critical in cramped quarters such as this.
In particular, I really like the device of putting the crossing between the modeled line/railroad and the second line/railroad all the way back into the right innermost corner of the alcove, while letting a longish interchange track between the two lines curve around the corner and exit over the aisle side of the layout near the second line, implying that it joins the other line just a little bit beyond the layout edge.
That wasn't my first thought for the location of the crossing, but it turns out to work well because it means that a train switching the area won't be going back and forth through the crossing (which seems unrealistic to me). And the crossing is really only there to justify the specific station model that was already on hand, although it does make the interchange track plausible.
The second line is long enough (about 18" without fouling the crossing, 24" to the back wall) that you can put "the front" of a train from the second railroad there as a scenic element,
I hadn't thought much about it, but that's a good point. The Chicago & Northwestern is a logical crossing railroad and had both gas-electric Doodlebugs and RDCs. The MILW had some early motor cars, too, but I don't know if they made it into the modeled era. The client is not on-line, but I'll drop him a note and mention your suggestion – thanks!
Using the lead for the ADM elevator to hold cars which has been loaded was also a neat "cheat".
It wasn't my favorite, but the client really wanted the granger "feel" of the grain elevators across the tracks from one another. So I struggled between unrealistic industry spurs that didn't allow room to roll the loaded cars past the spout and the contrived elevator lead. Contrived-but-barely-plausible won over clearly unrealistic (at least this time). And if I was going with contrived, I wanted the imagined rolling cars to be moving in the direction of frog-to-points through the turnout.
I like the way the runaround around the inside corner has been made long enough to run around quite a few cars, and that it include a bit of straight track on the left side, so coupling and uncoupling can be done on straight track instead of in a curve.
Some of that was luck, not planning, but it's important to be lucky, too.
I notice that the crossovers between the main and runaround both cross over from the rightmost to the leftmost track on both ends of the runaround. Byron - is there any particular reason for that arrangement, instead of using a left track to right track crossover from the main to the siding on the left end of the runaround?
A couple of reasons. One is that the client didn't want to trim any turnouts and he wanted the street that crosses the shelf to not cross any turnout points. So once you look at where the various industry turnouts need to be (including that darned ADM lead) and the fact that you don't want to create an s-curve by starting the crossover in the opposite direction too close to the inside curve of the siding, it sort of dictates this position. I also had to keep the end of the runaround long enough for the two RSC-2s, so that entered into the calculation also.
One thing I didn't mention in the article and probably should have is that the way I would probably switch this area is to use the siding track at the lower right as the lead and shuffle cars onto the interchange track and the upper right siding while putting them in spot order. From that track you can reach into the ADM elevator lead as well for those loads.
Only thing I could find to nitpick about (and it is a very small nit is the industry tracks for the ACB structure in the upper left hand corner. < snip>
Scenically, I think it will look very good to have the track disappear behind the building (and it allows the modelling of trucks or whatever on the side of the building not facing the RR tracks, but reach wise, it might be pushing it a little bit when trying to couple or uncouple cars, if this is done by hand and skewer
It's a good point and represented another trade-off. I really wanted all the structures to be on exactly the same angle relative to the shelf. (The Merchants Row II is 90 degrees to that angle)
So if one places the AC Brown structure at that same angle against the wall, it's not possible to serve it with two tracks (which I wanted for variety) without a wye turnout off the main or making the main the curved route of a straight turnout, both of which I wanted to avoid for esthetic reasons.
The owner can make use of the "delayed action" position of the Kadee turnouts, even hand-operated with skewers, to allow the uncoupling to be done "in the open" and then the cars shoved into the tracks.
Also, the variety of having the tracks behind the structure was very attractive and this was virtually the only spot to try it.
Eeyore? Naw, more like Rodney Dangerfield …