Hello all,
 

My Father and I have recently moved into a new house and thankfully have space for a Model Railroad. I have been playing with ideas for a model railroad for some time now, but have had trouble coming up with something to fit our space. Its a rather decnt space to use but oddly shaped, it measures just over 36 feet long and 13 feet wide at the widest points. Basically its a 11' long by 9' wide rectangle with two 13' by 13' squares on either end. We have been playing with the Idea for an around the walls design but in drawing it out on rolls of paper on the floor and in Xtrcad nothing seem to satisfy any of our ideas.

But in the January issue of Model Railroader they had ideas for their Bay Junction railroad based on a junction town, this got us to thinking something that may work. So I took and Reworked this design and loosely based it on the City of Battle Creek, Michigan. In Battle Creek you have the Grand Trunk Western and Norfolk Southern/Amtrak Mains that combine to run through Downtown.

Now our Design is not necessarily going to be Prototype we are going to do more of a Protolance and basically use the track layout. We do not necessarily plan to hold operating sessions. Its planned more just for running but has the potential to add operation eventually. We also plan to leave the Era open and design industrial spurs in, but build the Industries will be built on sections of Foam board that we could plug in to fit the area we are running. Hopefully this works ok.

I have included a Track plan with this article. The track plan included is just the mainlines and the basic staging areas. We have designed it to use all Atlas #6 Customline turnouts, our minimum radius is 33 3/4". The staging area will be on two levels with the lower level at lowest and top level 6" aboove it, with the front side of the layout set at 2 1/2" above the lower staging. Let me know what you all think.

Thanks David G.