My wife, kids and I just spent 8 months building our own house. From design to construction, we have done almost all of the work ourselves.

The second floor is the layout room, and also; my office and my wife's library. It's one open F shaped space with no separate rooms. The roof trusses were tediously designed to make it so.

Here is the problem - The truss engineers couldn't make my design work quite the way I wanted and so I have ended up losing 12" on each side of every outside edge on the 2nd floor. Note to self: "Have truss plans finalized before breaking ground if you ever do this again!"

Since the track plan was established before the house was built, it needs to be modified to fit the actual building.

Most of the layout is able to squeeze into the smaller space without design loss because it's made up of long straight runs, sweeping curves and open spaces between stations. It's prairie railroading!

Because it is prairie railroading there are a few constraints on design that are important to me:

1. Long stretches between towns. 20-25 car trains should not have their head in 1 town and tail in another.
2. No sharp curves. The line being modeled is essentially a straight run.
3. No trespassing in the wife’s library/sitting area. The committee says so.

At the south end of the line, the BNML, terminates in an interchange yard. It meets up with the CP, SOO, and BNSF lines. Needless to say this is a busy interchange and in my design also serves as the entrance to the lower level staging area.

ORIGINAL PLAN:

 

THE PROBLEM:

In the new space allotment, there isn’t enough room to have the BNSF interchange yard in its straight configuration AND the curves needed to loop down into staging. Sigh.

The Interchange yard on the BNSF at Noyes MN was going to be a fascinating area operationally and would have enough work to keep a 2nd operator interested for quite some time. But turning it into “staging in plain sight” reduces its functionality significantly and not being able to send trains away to the south (into staging) will really reduce the effect of this area. Reducing its capacity to allow the loop into staging is depressing and kinda breaks rule 3. Sigh again.

So here are 4 possible plan changes I have come up with.
(The area marked "Off Limits" is the library.)

PLAN 1

 

PLAN 2

 

PLAN 3

PLAN 4

 

What would you do? I’m open to suggestions!

- Bill
 

Are you reading this? Please comment and let me know!