Planning at first blush

So, I've thought about railroads before, and kicked around various ideas. Our basment is furnished, but is kinda an odd shape. It would work but to do the kinds of things I would want, it would take up a great deal of the space. I'm not sure I'd be allowed to co-opt that much livable room. (Added to that continuing work to recover from a flood down there makes the space unusable for a little while.) We have a 3rd bedroom, but it's small. like 10X12 and the doors for entry and closet are in inconvenient places. If I was to do an around the walls layout, it would be troublesome. That leaves us with the garage. After a lot of back and forth with myself I'm settling on a 2' wide shelf along the long axis of the garage (about 23 feet, so about 21 feet of shelf). I was thinking of 3, and at one point even 4 food wide, but 2' will leave room for the car during winter and will probably be easier in building. Along the back wall I was thinking of a second shelf, anything from 4' to 1' wide. I've kinda settled on 1' wide, as it will leave plenty of usable garage space and room for cars. I was planning with a 4' wide shelf in mind for some time, but I realized that for a non-walkaround design 4' is a long way to lean for uncoupling etc.

There were several designs with various dimensions in mind, with various levels of success. I'm using some software I purchased on line, and so far I've been really enjoying just tinkering with layout ideas. Some have been terribly complex and probably way too ambitious. Others are just unrealistic in general ways.

As a side note the software I'm using is 3d PlanIt from Trackplanning.com It was a little bit more than some of the others (and after using it, I'm not sure it was worth the extra) but it has some very nice features and I've been enjoying using it over all. It's helped me overcome one of my big hurdles, just understanding what will fit in what kind of space. That is too say, "How much space does a 36" radius curve take up?!?"

After a lot of back and forth, and probably four major re-starts on the planning process I've settled on the garage space with a 21 foot, two foot wide shelf and a 18 foot, one foot wide shelf basically forming an L. I think this will work well for me. There won't be many broad sweeping curves, but that's not what I'm interested in anyway. This is going to be a pure switching layout and I think I can do good in that space.