Time to snap out of my analysis paralysis.  A number of years ago, I acquired a Bachmann Plus Car Repair Shop kit off of the Bay.  For those of you who may be unfamiliar, it's a 3-bay metal barn with large skylights in the roof and molded-in track grooves in the base to add your favorite flavor of rail.  I had purchased it with the intent of using it for a small shelf layout with the premise of a shortline operating over UP and BNSF tracks in northern Colorado.

In 1983 I was able to convince the Board of the not-for-profit agency that I ran that it would be cost-effective to buy a hard drive to replace the 8" IBM floppy disks we we using for storage. We purchased a Corvus 5 Kb (that's 5,000 BYTES OF INFO) unit housed in a 12" cube for $5,000! Just tickled. Today, of course, terabyte capacity is purchased in Costco for a couple of hundred dollars. Driven by demand, ultra fine, multicolor 3-D printing is now years, not decades away. All honor to those in every field who are buying and experimenting and pushing things along for the rest of us.

After spending much time wrestling with some design shortcuts I took 10 years ago, I decided to scrap the current Penn Lake, and start over.  My library of Chuck Yungkurth books inspired me to actually model some of the operations I currently represent with staging.  And finally, my advancing middle, is no longer compatible with some of the choices I made a decade ago.

Hi guys,

As I mentioned last night, I got some pictures for you.  I'd like to have some constructive feedback if you have any, please.

The finished crossover. I haven't included pictures of the switch operating knobs but I may in the future if you guys want to see them.

The intermodal spur