Looking For Critique On My "Super Horseshoe Curve" Test Track Layout Plan

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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Hello everyone on the MRR forums. Hope you had a good Merry Christmas and in a few days starting, a hopefully better new year.

I am having trouble posting photos onto my post, but I have incuded image links to Imgur.

I am looking for critique and constructive critism on my track plan that I designed in Rail Modeller Pro. The layout is a sort of glorified test track, with five radious curves from smallest to biggest, 24", 26", 28", 31", 34’ radiuses. I call it the super horseshoe curve as at its max the real horseshoe curve has four curves (currently three as Conrail removed one section) so I added a fifth. I am not confident to ballast track with corkbed yet, so I plan to use HO scale kato Unitrack for now.

The purpose of this layout is for testing my equipment, such as seeing what length and sizes of rolling stock and locomotives would work and look best on the various radius curves.

The layout would be 7.5’ in width and 16’ in length. I would make 10 modules for easy moving and assembly. Each would be 2.5’ in width and 4’ long. I understand the basic width of a module is 2’ but in order to fit the curved I had to add half a foot. I was inspired after seeing this double loop, double siding, with a interchange crossover that you can use creating some of Kato’s unitrack sets.

I ended up adding the 31" and 34" Kato unitrack curves to it, along with increasing the length. So this is the final result.

The problem is I must first renovate the finished part of the basment that I intend to put this in. It is seperated into two rooms, and I and my family intend to at some point remove the two walls.

I dont know what the overall final length of the room will be should we choose to keep the closet or not, but In t

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OK, so the area in the middle, do you have to crawl under the layout to get in there and run trains? That is the only way your going to be able reach most of this “layout”.

It just seems to be a lot of work, just to “test trains”? I mean, to each his own, but why not just build a layout with the largest possible radius, which is whats going to look and work the best anyway.

Unless of course, you really don’t want a finished layout, just a “test” track, for what ever reason, which I’m not understanding.

So, is your goal to start your own YT channel and be the “go to” place for people that want to know just what equipment will run on what specific radiuses ?

Mike.

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Now that you say this, I should give this idea a try. There are not that many good guides or visual videos showing what lengths of equipment look like on certain radius curves. You have to do deep search to find any pictures or videos.

The youtuber who I mentioned did a review of two ScaleTrains autoracks. He had them on the 26" or 28" radius curve, and they almost looked good. I kinda wished he had put them on the 31" curve.

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First three photos made visible…

Link 1:

Link 2:

Link 3:

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOXeG8vAZc30AaHTHjGw_yw

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Hey thanks Tom. I should mention that when trying to link photos I only get a blue box with a white question mark box. On my first attempt despite seeng this box my photos still showed, but my attemps didnt work out when I tried editing my post. I even tried unchecking the contraints box, but it didnt work.

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Engi,

Here’s what I did to post your photos using Firefox as a browser:

  1. Right clicked on the Imgur photo and chose “Copy Image Location”
  2. Clicked on the Insert/Edit icon above the text box and entered the copied image location into the Source text box
  3. Clicked OK - At that point the image(s) became visible in the main text area
  4. Clicked the “Submit” button when I had all the images

That should work for posting any photos outside of the forum. The key is to use “Copy Image Location”.

HTH,

Tom

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Hey thanks Tom. I will give it a try on a new post. But what about the image constraints checkbox? Should I leave it alone checked or unchecked?

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I don’t get that checkbox at all. Why don’t you just experiment with both settings and see what happens.

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I’ve never touched that checkbox. The default is checked. The only time I enter dimensions is when I want to post a gif or something humorous that is worth an inch of screen space vs 4-5"

On the way I usually see my imgur photos, there are 7 ways to link a picture. I use the BBLink and copy and paste it directly into the text without any of the icons