The single track steel deck Mississippi River railroad crossing at Dubuque, Iowa to East Dubuque, Ill., is five spans of Parker Through Truss with a 350-foot Pratt swing span. (Pins are visible in photos.) I'm modeling the entire bridge at scale length (9-ft-plus in N scale). I will make the bridging elements with my CNC mill.

Photos:
http://www.johnweeks.com/river_mississippi/pagesA/umissAR03.html

Hope someone here will help me with questions:

Have a 22' x 12' room that I am going to run a double main line around the room mostly for N Scale passenger car sets.

Rite now I have the Kato California Zephyr and The Daylight passenger cars set.  Expect I will add a Sante Fe passenger set at some point.

Not going to do any switching or really any other sidings other than a passenger terminal.    Just want to watch these wonderful passenger cars go around the room.  I have an 0n30 layout below this so that satisfies any switching itch.

A little time over lunch netted me this initial draft of a plan. Still very much a work in progress but I can get a good number of the industries on the line minus those in Statesville so I'm happy. I'll flesh it out a bit more and identify which industries are adjacent to each other and which would require a full lap around to get to since they are farther down the line than the plan shows at a future point this week or weekend. A quick calc indicates that using the lapping method for each town nets just over 4 scale miles of mainline. Not to shabby and quite a nice run for operations.

I have 4x6 cards for each train that runs during my operating sessions with terse instructions about that train's switching duties. Most switching involves picking up cars that have completed being loaded or unloaded and setting out cars that are to be delivered.

For years I have for called the “pickup” cars “outbound cars” since they are leaving that particular switching area and heading for the main yard.  Likewise, I called cars coming from the main yard to the switching area “inbound cars”.