Well, I guess i met my deadline. I have finished laying all the track for the expansion, wired it all, wired all the switches, and constructed the two duckunders…with lots of help and responses to my questions from our forum along the way.
Here is a graphic. Before you go all critical on me, let me explain that the old section on the left was what I started with three years ago…a 3.5 X 6 foot layout designed to slide under a bed. I added to that in the next house I moved to, until it was the 5 X 15 ft. layout shown on the left…also at floor level in a storage space.
Now, wonderously, I have space in a real crawl space in the new house (I wonder one day if I will ever have a real room to work in?) However, converting this crawl space to a layout room has been an eyeopener and quite successful. After Xmas I will post lots of photos to silence any doubters that my crawl space is a poor area for the hobby. My great delight is that I can actually work under the layout now, whereas that all had to be prewired and sealed on the old layout sections.
This has taken 9 months of work…however the first three were not full-on layout building as I had to first build an office in my garage for storage of trains etc. and then clean and prepare the crawl space (luckily it is nice and dry and dust free, and climate controlled.).
In any case, this weekend I finished the duck unders and control box and now just have to clean up the track to begin running trains.
The diagram below shows where I will be running them. Switches 7 a and b are to a dogbone loop on one side of the crawl space. The dividing wall runs along this section between the #7 switches, so these switches run a train into a tunnel at each point…and the dog bone loop at the north is just a long tunnel run…but actually not in a tunnel but beyond the wall if you get my drift.
Anyway, more on the functions of the yards and spurs later with photos