If my next layout is an around the room design that requires a duckunder (it will most likely), I’m considering building up the floor on the inside of the layout about one foot with a step up to the floor from under the duck-under. Provides one more foot of head clearance under the duck-under, making it perhaps a nod-under.
Might be a bit tricky to get the exact position of the step up and the duckunder as to maximize the floor space and not bonk the head as I step up.
A fix is available from railroading a few generations ago: installation of telltales! [(-D]
Can you explain how having a turnback/return loop (at each end) prevents left being west and right being east?
Thanks.
Well if you use simple balloon track loops at each endit does not. But they are hard to scenic and/or hard to hide.
I run DC and prefer not to have reverse loops. If I want to reverse a whole train I have a wye into a staging yard that will do that.
My track plan is a double track twice around the room loop. The second trip around the room is hidden and passes thru multiple small staging yards behind and under the scenery.
Sheldon
To explain more, not everyone builds shelf type linear layouts, so some layouts end up with places where the east/west viewing flip flops.
My new layout plan is posted in the thread that prompted this one. The one about cat6 cables.
Our models also look better from the inside of our selectively compressed curves than they do from the outside of those curves. So while I do have some peninsulas with outside curves, most of my visible curves are inside curves.
The outside curves are broken up by scenery, backdrops and by one turn helixes that extend the run time as the trains pass thru the backdrop into the next scene.
The twice around design, with the hidden staging basically on the same level as the visible trackage allows cutoffs in and out of the staging at various locations. This does two things, provides simulated interchange connections, and separates the two big loops into four small dedicated loops for display running.
Most of these features would not work as well, or would take more space with a walk in design.
Sheldon
Because if you are viewing the entire loop and both tracks at the same time, west- left and east-right means that you have just watched the train make a 180 degree directional turn, probably for no earthly prototypical reason. Unless its a mountain grade, but since we would not actually see the entire loop from our viewing distance, its best to put a backdrop down the center of the turnback loop (so we are not seeing both the east and west tracks at the same time)
If the trunback loop is supposed to represent a straight section of track that is simply folded over because of layout room space contraints, then a left-west running train turns into a right-west running train. The train is moving to the right but is still traveling west schematically.
Sheldon is trying to avoid those oddities, and so would I if I built a layout that had peninsulas. I would probably never build a dogbone shaped layout for those very reasons.
Yes, all true of my visual goals as well.
Very few of my curves show more than a
Also, if you are standing at the base of a peninsula (and right is to the east), and the train is moving to the right…from the base to the tip…as you walk around the peninsula the train is still moving to the right, but now from the tip to the base.
It simply made a curve around the backdrop to accomodate layout space problems, but schematically the train never changed direction.