I think I may have crossed the line of putting too much on the layout, but I'm not sure I'm going to fix it. There was one industry that I really wanted to have on the layout to generate car traffic, that is a Municiple Solid Waste Transfer station. It would recive mty solid waste 20' containers on flats and send out full containers on flats. Atlas has a model for this, 85' flats that hold 4 twenty foot containers. I like this 'cuse it's very modern, and very prototypcial.
A couple of problems with it is that 85' cars are gonna be tight on my 24" radius layout. And I've already filled up most if not all of the usuable industry space on the "west" end of the layout.
I did find a place to put it, it would be a straight sidding and it feeds directly into my curved run around trackage, which means the long cars would face a minum of tight turning. So that will probably work. But the location means that I can't model any of the industry itself, it would all be in backdrop. The only thing that would exist would be the sidding itself. I'm not sure how I feel about this. There are other places I could put the thing, but it would mean dropping an "existing" industry, and I also can't really put it at the "west" end of the layout since there are several food service places at that end, and really, who wants food prepaired next to a garbage dump. In addition, the way I have the layout set up, with tracks running down both edges of the shelf, means that industries in the "middle" are trapped. Since I think the transfer station would be too big to model whole, it would need to be at least partly in backdrop, but I don't really have a good place to do that. So where it is, turns out to be the best place for it, just not sure it's worth it.
I've come to the conclusion I want a verity of different kinds of cars on the layout, a few of each, for visual interst, and to make switching interesting too. At the moment I have: plastic pellet hoppers, flower hoppers, cement hoppers, box, reffer, chemical tank, food service tank, gon, and a team track that could accept other kinds of traffic. Do I need solid waste COFC traffic? well probably not, but it's something that's been part of the concept from the begining, and I'm kinda attached to the idea. It's really perfect in some ways, a populated island would have trash, and they'd need to get rid of it. If they don't want trash trucks driving over the causeway that connects the island to the mainland, bardge or rail float service are their choices. And since this is a model railroad, rail float seems like a good idea to me.
I'm gonna continue to noodle with the layout of things, I've been switching my cement distributor and lumber yard back and forth for a couple of days now, but I am kinda starting to get set in my ideas for this. I need to be careful of that, but at the same time it's also how the project will progress. I'll keep noodling and we'll see what happens. It may not change until I get to the point of physically testing cars and radii... at which point a bunch of stuff may change, who knows.
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