I am looking over my track plan with an eye to starting to purchase rail. Aside from asthetics, is there any real advantage to having Code 83 for the mainline and, say, Code 70 for the yards and sidings? Is there that much visual differnce once ballast, landscaping etc. is added? What about availability of various switches etc.? Cost? Transitioning?  Your thoughts would be appreciated as always.

Hi, Jack from Star, Idaho.  I ventured out and did some looking at the 70 ton three truck climax that I received as a replacement for the defective shay.  Well I opened up the water tender and found that the PCB had a small motor function decoder with a standard 8 pin plug.  I removed that and removed the PCB to expose the speaker housing.  There I found that a one inch 8 ohm speaker fit perfectly in the factory made area  for the speaker.  No drilling holes or creating an area for the speaker a great improvement.

This is my Design that I am building now. Two Issues I need help on, one is how do I ballast a yard? Do I cover the entire yard with even gravel or do I make like on the mains?

and second, How do you model dirt and grass, I know you can make/buy a static grass machine, but other that that what can you use??

Well, I was going to show you my plan, but I can't upload a PDF to show up....

Thanks.

 The BQR has a stub yard & industrial complex at one end of the layout. This has posed a number of interesting challenges not the least of which is trying to effectively utilize the limited space senior management has made available for the layout. The design for the yard utilizes a number of Walthers-Shinohara #6 double slips -- currently sitting on the benchwork. The turnouts as provided by the vendor are a bit over 15" in length. But there is a fair amount of track past the guard rails of the double slip -- almost 3".