I know it’s been said before, and will be said again. But I did the single most effective planning today. Dad and I put foam down, and grabbed the baseplates for what buildings we already had, approximated with a few others, as well as whatever track was there, and laid out almost the entirety of the Bay in Half-Moon. I wish I’d done that sooner. Now, there’s curves standing in for no. 4 switches, EZ on top of flex, a pair of bachmann 3ftrs stretched across the aisle to hold the palce fo rthe bridge, and at least one “diamond” stacked up like a Dagwood Sandwich, but it’s the most productive thing we’ve done so far. And the best part, if I can’t reach someplace to put track there, I have no business putting track there Yes no?
I loved RTS, and did a fair bit of icebreaking with it. But now it’s time to do a mass over-simplification of everything and get ready to run trains.
Microplan everything down to the location of each individual spike.
Cram ten yards of spaghetti into an 8-yard bowl.
Combine three track gauges into a space the size of a coffee table (in 1:80 scale!)
I finally learned to minimalize planning and get on with construction.
These days, I make a broad master plan (with a pencil on quadrille paper) based on Armstrong squares of appropriate size, and don’t plan a specific area in detail until it’s time to start cookie-cutting plywood sub-roadbed for it. As a result, tracklaying and operation* can move right along, not get hung up on a particular problem.
This morning I came up with an elegant solution for a tracklaying problem involving interchange of unit coal trains at the main connection between the JNR and TTT. I have been building on this layout for over four years now. If I had waited to begin construction until I could point to a ‘perfect’ track plan my garage would be home to a pile of dusty unopened boxes and some uncut steel studs. (There are other little ‘opportunities’ I have yet to seriously consider, never mind solve.)
*Operation. Just as soon as the track goes down, some electicals go in and I start running SOMETHING, even if something is a teakettle tank loco and three gons full of spikes, ties and rail joiners. Now, with something less that 1/3 of my main track in and one staging area operational I am operating a sort of “Reader’s Digest” edition of my final schedule, with a DMU train and a couple of freights of different characteristics - and that teakettle powered work train.
Yay! Another layout saved from analysis paralysis.
Putting down track, exactly as you’ve done, is often the best way to visualize your track plan. After weeks, maybe months on the computer, I grabbed a bunch of old brass track and put it down on the carpet. I immediately saw things which looked fine on paper but terrible in reality.
HInt: Think about where you will put roads. Too many track plans fail to allow for streets, or try to fit a main street into a space barely wide enough for a country path.
It’s nice to see this finally dawning on the latest generation of modellers. When I lost about a third of my planned layout room to “family considerations”, I threw away the original trackplan (well, it was actually just a sketch).[:-^] Instead, I cut a couple of sheets of 3/4" plywood into curves of various radii, then layed them on the benchwork wherever they seemed to fit best and connected them with straight(ish) sections. I’m pleased with the results, which offer good operating possibilities along with lots of great locations for photos.
I was trying to use that great time saver called RTS and a computer, but found it was a lot easier to pull out a clip board from my flying days, with graph paper left over from my high school days.
At work I was always on the move and never new where I would end up throughout the day. I always had a backpack with changes of cloths, a couple of meals, a Model Railroader mag and my clip board where my RR empire was transferred from brain to paper. When I had down time the clip board was out and planning was on.
Like so many of us, my wants were larger than my room. Every time I tried to come up with a plan it didn’t work as something was always throwing a wrench in the works as far as accommodating the footprint was concerned. Doors, windows, fireplaces all got in the way. My solution was to take the room and draw benchwork using as much as my allotted space as I could while still having good access to everything.
After I had my benchwork drawn up, that was the space I had to fit a layout plan in. My reasoning was that in real life the railroad had to work around the geography that was presented to it, so I would do the same. It went quite well after that. I had room for small industry sidings and scaled down versions of larger industries if I so desire. I had learned early that the full scale versions of port side coal or grain operations would take half my room. A prairie grain elevator or two looked pretty good.
Once I had everything drawn up freehand on my clip board. I needed to put it on something more workable. I went to staples and bought a pad of big graph paper that measured 2’ x 3’ with 1" squares. This was perfect. I drew legends in the corner that I could use my high school geometry set with when drawing radiuses Etc. and transferred my plan to this larger graph paper. It was quick and easier than any computer software as far as I was concerned. And I use the computer for a lot of things. I think we spend too mu
Two layouts so far for me, both designed on graph paper. Took about 2 hours of concentrated work once I had the general idea and the givens and druthers worked out. I would first doodle three possibilities, merge them a bit, and then do up the eureka plan in about another hour using scaled drawings with compass and ruler. From there, applying 3/4" masking tape to the concrete floor to show bench outline and track placement. Once I was able to give it the thumbs-up, saw and hammer came out.