Wye Switch

Overall the plan looks very doable.

If you put a Wye switch in as the "king switch" in your yard, you could gain another car length of room in the right side tracks.

You also might want to consider "cocking" the whole plan on the actual benchwork a couple degrees, so that the tracks aren't running exactly parallel to the edges of the layout.  Up side is it makes it visually more interesting, down side is it may mean you have to kitbash some buildings, trimming off the back or a corner.

One option is to scan and print out copies of your switches.  You don't need all of them or even both "hands".  You can buy a left hand, scan it and then flip the image to make a right hand switch.  Got to Walmart and buy a package of newsprint, packing paper, and tape pieces together the size of your layout.  Then you can set buildings cars and switches down on the paper to see how it fits together.  Even if you don't have the benchwork built you can do it on a floor or a table or the benchwork you do have built.

One thing to add to Dave's comment

You can also mock up the buildings with cardboard taped together.

Another Industry and Benchwork

I really like your plan and you could squeeze in 1 more industry.  In your yard the very last track could be a team track.  For example a short line near here leased a short stub track to a company that would unload plastic pellet hoppers into a truck to take back to their factory.

As for your benchwork, check out the DCC Guy videos on Youtube.  He is doing a series right now on building 2x4 modules.

To add to lirc201...

You could also put an industry where your engine track is. A lot of small to midsize prototype yards lack dedicated engine tracks. Any of the yard tracks could serve as an engine park location. A small trailer or container could serve as a crew/yard office. 

If you would like to sometimes

return with the engine first you could take the first track in the yard closest to the edge and tie it onto the second track in with a switch under the brown boxcar.  Now you could pull your returning train into track 2 and escape with the engine on track 1 back to the servicing area.  Just a thought...........  I love the overall plan a lot.

As a small way to ease your life...

You may want to consider lengthening your ability to run around cars by adding a switch at the throat of your yard and at the bottom of your first runaround, and having a parallel track through the broad curve. You'd have to bump out the corner just a bit, but it is doable.

The layout already looks good without it, but you may find your limited runaround space to be tedious after a while.

Run around

On the subject of the run around, it looks like the run around is about 3 modern cars long.  Depending on how many cars you are spotting or pulling, you might have to make more than 1 “trip” to switch the facing point industries.  But that might not be bad since you don’t have a lot of room to set cars over.

Having a longer run around is nice, but with a smaller layout, can you really take advantage of it given the lengths of the other tracks?

Engine track

I fully agree that a layout this size and era doesn’t need engine facilities, and really just needs a tie up track if you are going to have more than one engine on the layout at a time.  If there is a way to make the tie up track not a switchback that could be an improvement.  If engine 1 fills the front yard track with cars, then you want to swap eng  1 for eng 2, that won’t work unless eng 1 moves cars out of the track.  If the switch broke out a different way it would make swapping engines easier.  Keeping the track open to let engines in and out means that track can’t be full, reducing the capacity of the yard.

As per usual, Dave is right

As per usual, Dave is right on top of the conversation.

Having run a few prototype short lines we rarely had a special track for an engine. One, we fenced in enough room from the clearance point of the main track back two car lengths ( to hold our SW 1500 and caboose office/shoving platform) to an industry gate/spur. On another we always tied up our back to back, GP-15s on a plastics, company's spur since the area was well, lited (security), employees could park in company parking lot, train consists from our connecting railroad delivered off the plastic's company fax machine, diesel, fuel was delivered weekly, by truck and engine sand was picked up in bags at another customer's track and loaded onto the engines using their fork lift.

Too many folks expect a one, horse short line to have expensive locomotive facilities and yards which in fact are rare and not required. Short liners make do with what they are given and spend their money on fixing track, bridges and growing the business rather than painting up diesels, building structures (unless they are trans load ones) and adding tracks. I think you might surprised how many short lines occasionally have customers load/unload cars right on their "main" lines rather than a dedicated spur. 

Barry

Same background

Barry, right there with you on the "no service facilities" bit. We had a contractor fuel our engines, playground sand bags hauled up by hand to the sand hatches, 55-gallon oil drums on a loading dock, and a nice customer's fire hydrant for cooling water.

I did get spoiled in that we could easily turn a 110-car unit train in the available space for a runaround. I covered some of the day-to-day ops in  my blog.

Here it is embedded. I like

Here it is embedded. I like the plan but would simplify it to remove the scrap yard and leave more room for scenery.   

Engine facilities and other suggestions

As others have said, there is a strong case to be made for a simple engine storage area. The track itself can be wired so that it is a programming track if the owner so desires, but the facilities themselves can consist of a small office building, too shed/garage, and a fuel station for the locomotive.  That would look far better, in my opinion, than some large engine house with a full shop and attached office.  The idea being to add character to the layout without overwhelming the small space.

As for the rest of the structures, adding a few small buildings to the front of the layout would break it up into different scenes that trains run to.  I'm not talking about a large warehouse or something that blocks off a lot of the viewing, but rather small single story buildings like a shed or garage.  The area where the LPG tanks are shown is a great example of that.  The buildings along the rear of the layout can be much larger, but also should not overwhelm the scene.  At best, those warehouses will be small by prototype standards.

Then there's the track plan itself.  I like how it is now and, Joe, you could certainly keep it as is and it would likely work.  But as others have said, lengthening the runaround is not a bad idea.  The crossover on the right side could be moved into the curve a bit, using a curved turnout on the main rather than a RH turnout.  This not only eliminates a potential S curve, but would likely give you an additional car length or two of space.for switching.  You could do the same for the yard with a curved turnout at the yard throat and that would lengthen the yard by one or two car lengths.  The curve seems wide enough that curved turnouts could be employed without any issue.

Besides turnouts, I personally would be looking for ways to eliminate unneeded tracks.  The yard, for instance, could have one or two tracks eliminated if it was a bit longer.  That would leave more room for scenery.  Another place would be near the LPG tanks.  Having one track, slightly longer, and laid at an angle would break up all the parallel lines and then there would be more space for the tank car loading platforms and piping.  The warehouses and bakery is another example.  Facilities that size often share tracks, and replicating this on the model makes for interesting switching because two industries are being served on one track.  That leaves room to expand the bakery.

My final suggestion is that you have a great opportunity to create some vertical depth with a road crossing under the tracks between the warehouse and the scrap yard.  Just such a bridge exists in Brookings, South Dakota, where I initially went to college.  The situation on your layout would make sense because a grade crossing there would be constantly blocked by parked trains.  I don't really see any other place where you could add a road, so this is a great option in my opinion.  Below is a photo of the bridge:

That bridge holds up the mainline, a siding, and two turnouts are placed up there as well.  The height is only about 12 feet.

The back story?

   Do you know the type of location you want to portray,  what part of a city or town, how the cars get on and off scene, traffic level, etc. The mood you want to set is the big factor in what a track plan should look like. The short multi track yard looks like something one might have seen in New York waterfront terminals for example. An option for a less dense area might be a 3 track double ended yard extending from layout end to end around the curve. How the cars come and go would determine what kind of staging or fiddle tracks you'd need. It could be as simple as swapping out cars on one of the yard tracks between operating sessions or as complicated as active interchange using temporary staging sections.  I certainly wouldn't start with parts of other layout plans as that removes you one step from the real thing right away, it's much better to start looking for real scenes that resemble what you want to end up with.With more info on the overall goal we could give better advice.....DaveB

Wow! Thank you everyone for

Wow! Thank you everyone for all your great ideas and gracious comments. There is such a cornucopia of ideas my head is swirling.

After looking at all the comments I tried to pick ideas that would be easily doable for my limited skills. The general consensus seemed to be to take out the engine service track. I have no problem with that what so ever. I decided to move the scrap yard to the bottom right hand corner. That gave me a more open space between the warehouses and the lumber yard. I made the lumber yard sit on a spur which gives me more room to maneuver. I can add cassettes at both ends of the layout which will help with switching.

I like this track plan better thanks to all the suggestions which got my brain thinking a little bit. MRH always come through, Thanks Guys

Joe FCEN60