The space represents my garage. it's 23 feet along the left side, and about 21 feet along the back, of which I'm using a 22X19 space along the walls, hopefully leaving enough room for cars in the garage. The grid is 6" squares (the small squares are 6 inches, the larger ones are a foot). North in the world of the railroad points to the lower right corner (which is close to actual north in the house). The shelf along the left side is 2 foot wide, the shelf along the top is 1 foot wide and will have the staging yard (serviced by the carfloats) underneath. I haven't decided on a height yet, but I don't think it'll be too high, mostly to facilitate reaching.
So some things about the setup.
In the upper right corner, the West end of the railroad, is the railroads yard and float bridge. You can make out the carfloat there as well. A dual carfloat switching lead with a crossover (fairly prototypical) then two storage tracks (which may extend out onto a "pier" structure if I need more capacity). The short siding that runs east from the top yard track will be for engine service. There may or may not be an engine house, or perhaps the demolished remains of an engine house there. Moving railroad East from the yard is a curved turnout, and a run around. I could have just had the switching crew running around in the yard, but I really didn't want to have trains running backwards that far. Even though it's a very short trip, I wanted trains to pull forward out of the yard, then do their run around move. Run arounds are a necessity since there's a number of facing point sidings.
After the run around the "main line" splits in two. A North (right) and South (left) spur. the south spur immediately has a siding on it which will be the Municipal Waste container loading siding. It then continues on straight, serving 3 industries to the railroad east. One on a siding and two that share the end of the track. It stops before it crosses the third street.
The North (right) spur has two trailing point sidings right off the bat. The first one which leads back to 3 tracks is the Parks Polymer & Plastics plant, which is a major customer of the PHI and gets a lot of cars. The second that is at the right side is a team track that may have a bulk unloading set up as well for off site customers (thus increasing the diversity of traffic). The North Spur then emerges out onto a street (as yet unnamed) and runs down the side of the street switching various industries. This is baised loosly on the set up the Cross Harbor railroad had/has in Brooklyn NYC. The switching track for a lot of the industries runs right along first street), and in some areas right down the middle. There are several industries switched off there, and I've gone out of my way to include some track work that intrests me, like the crossing leading into the sidings, and the tight radius curve that goes out and crosses over to come in at an angle near the railroad West end of the North siding.
As the plan exists now the track at one time continued on down the middle of the street, but has been abandoned past the point it ends on the layout. If the layout were ever to move and expand, more could be added past this point.
And well... that's it. Now that the track plan is out there, I'm going to be thinking more about operations and industries (or at least posting more about those).
As you can see it's busy. I really packed a lot of switching into the layout. It may very well be too much. It may be too tight, it may be too ambitious for my skill level. But I've really fallen in love with the design and I think it will give me all the things I'm looking for in a railroad that I can operate for a long time to come. I think with this design I could even have two crews working at once. One switching incoming and outgoing carfloats in the yard, and the other switching industries. That would be good should I ever have someone over to operate with. I could probably have as many as 4 operators, if each crew had a conductor and an engineer. I like that idea as well.
I haven't left a lot of room for scenery. And I know that. I'm less interested in modeling the city than I am in the switching operation. I do plan to put buildings in, but really they are more there to be car load destinations then they are to be models. Having said that of course, I am going to make a crack at landscaping and buildings simply to learn, and I hope to be able to add some interesting features. Everything on the South spur (except the one siding) will either be flats, or photo backgrounds. There isn't enough room to have back to back industries.
No comments:
Post a Comment