Track Plan Revision

Hi Yannis,

Just looking at your plan, and well, is this plan for railfanning or do you plan on operation? If operation, then you need some type of staging or at least an interchange point. You could work in a small double end yard in the area where you have the main road in your downtown area. By adding a left hand turnout coming off the passing siding near the freight house siding, you can extend the track to curve into the area occupied by the road along the edge of the layout. Also the bench work could be extended where the notch is to add length. Now you would have a place for cars to come and go from the layout. It would act as a small yard/staging yard, where you could hand fiddle cars off the layout to either drawers or shelves under the layout. As the plans stands, you have no place for trains or cars to go. Just an idea.

James Barnes, Jr.

Thank you James!

I have considered staging, but i do not have room for this in this particular space.

The layout is designed for ops for the freight train following the prototype back then. The idea is that i will have the ops session with the local freight on the mainline hauling something like 18-20 cars.

Taking for the sake of example an EB local, approximately 5-8 cars will not be needed and actually belong to the WB consist. The local will do the switching along the line, doing some laps between specific industries to simulate distance. A cut of 5 cars belonging to the WB consist will be stored/parked off spot at a spur/siding. When the EB freight will have finished it's run, the motive power and caboose will switch ends, and the WB cut will be added to the consist, while a 5-car EB cars' cut will take it's place at the siding parked. This will create the WB for the next run.  I hope I am making sense with this.

Cassette for staging?

If you put a left hand turnout to bring a track behind the ATSF freight house (#7) going off the layout, a cassette on a cart would allow you to move cars of and on the layout.  The cassettes could be stored on shelves under the layout.  You would not need to rmove/replace all of the cars every session. Perhaps moving 5-10 cars off and replace them with the same number of different cars would give some variety so that you are not just shifting the same cars around all of the time.

re: Cassette

Russ this is a good idea, and i have previously considered removable staging. I opted for simply leaving the said set/cut of cars that would go on the cassette, parked at the siding where #5/#6 industries are, essentially off spot at the siding of the freight house, along the curve (but not blocking the adjacent 90 degree street).

"I opted for simply leaving

  I think this is a wise decision. Bringing cars onto a layout with a cassette increases the complexity of the operation with no real operational benefit. Adding them as a unit from a cassette or singly by hand ends up with the same on scene scenario.As long as you have a dedicated track to place and remove the cars between operating sessions I think you'll be fine....DaveB 

Well thought out Yannis.    

Well thought out Yannis.

Thank you all!

Dave thank you for the confirmation! I did some tests for the ops and the plan seemed to work.

Dee thanks! You have been more than helpful in this, with your wise insights and advice!

  I did some tests for the

The only part I see that might be a problem is the width of the city with all the streets and buildings. It looks like it could be hard to build and maintain due to reach in distance. I'd also be concerned about the time and cost in modeling so many buildings and city details. With only one track running thru that scene the complexity and time required to build it  seems high for the operational benefit it would return.I'd consider just building the street closest to the rear and the buildings on both sides of it, leaving off the street and buildings nearest to the operator's aisle.That would simplify the construction and maintenance situation  and improve the reach in distance.. ..DaveB 

...downtown area

Dave good points and in order to address the main one (access to tracks), the whole downtown area is on wheels/roll-out module. So access to tracks is super easy.

True that there is no operational benefit for the downtown area, it is simply for scenery purposes and visual appeal, like a personal choice. The depth and complexity of the scene and the opportunity to model a lot of commercial structures in this particular scene, was one of the key reasons for designing this layout (and choosing this particular prototypical location). I totally agree though that it will be time consuming and complex.

Another idea

Another approach to staging might be to move the track behind the downtown buildings in slightly toward the center area, and add a track or two behind a low view block in front of the tree lined wall (use a wye switch at the top of industry 8 corner).  This could even be a double ended yard, with the tracks coming out of staging to the right of the freight house.

Geof

Staging

If the city and structures, and the track behind the city, were not a a right angle to the bench, one could but a false backdrop behind the city, and at least provide two or three fairly long layover siding, off of the scene.  I think it could add some interest to have a train disappear for a while, as it went "somewhere" before reappearing.

with respect to staging

All good points and ideas with respect to staging solutions and I would like to thank you for these. I too would appreciate having a staging area. However one thing i might have not mentioned, is that this is a layout meant to be moved at some point, becoming part of a much bigger (hopefully) layout in which staging will be fully featured. The Toma approach was a great inspiration in this (start working/building the future layout now).

Given these circumstances I needed to make some compromises, and not having staging was one of these.

Maybe it is not a bad idea, albeit off-topic, to post at some point a version/concept of this future trackplan/layout.