I’ve posted some images of my plan in the past, but have now added some buildings, streets, and building flats. The loops shown in one of the pics are unscenicked and removable.
Does anyone have any ideas for industries?
I’m thinking this will be a fictional location of a northern or southern california city in 1996, just before ther merger of SP and UP.
I attempted to hide the backdrop quite a bit. I will use cutouts of digital pictures to plaster the backdrop with buildings - I’m thinking I could maybe do this using a regular printer and printing one building at a time.
I tried not to make it too timesaver-ish. I think the only possibly silly track arrangement is maybe the spur that comes off the spur on the right and goes to the left - did this because I wanted a crossing, and a curved one nonetheless!!!
All track will be handlaid (with a layout this small, what better things would I have to do anyway!).
Alright, lend me some thoughts, and some industry ideas folks. I’m thinking the flats could be regular consumer storefronts since they’re on the street, and not served by the railroad. The biggest industry is the long building on the right, which has two tracks in front of it.
Bottom left - I’m thinking interchange tracks between the two main lines (dark gray - maybe one SP, and one UP)
Looks great to me. I too have an HO modular style layout, starting with a city type module with three tracks that intersect to merge into two main lines. I used a combination of several brands of business building kits made into blocks for the streets to run between located toward the back of the city section to allow for a street. Although I tried using cutouts of buildings to gain depth of the city scene it did’nt look right. I’ll try using “flats” to create this element of depth. You would be amazed that a 20" wide module can be set up to appear very deep with a few tricks.
The tracks then merge into two lines both going around onto another section that has tunnels and two mountains, this gives the illusion of distance over a short span of only about 9 ft. The country and mountain areas are covered with the use of farm homes and a general store in the fore-ground and the tracks leading into a twin tunnel. That’s where the layout stops…for now.
The outer wall of the room will be used to “hang” the tracks on a 18-22" wide modual that eventually will come around to a reversing loop and more switch yards. The entire set-up fits into a usable space of about 9’x 14’, not bad when you consider most people don’t have huge train rooms in a 16x 80 ’ mobil home.
Yard switching for mine RR is done with a switch engine and then the entire train is hooked up to two SD-40 type locos ready on the main track to pull the whole thing around to the main loop ( when completed ) my passenger ops are run with F- series locos lashed up the same way.
I have a mixed fleet that represents Rio Grande, UP, SP, SF, BN, MTK, and are a mix of locos, I cater to the lines of the Southwestern US and have a mix of rolling stock that reflect most roads out here in the West, although a few Eastern roads snuck in, I can’t figure that out !!!@@###, just kidding. Just as with todays RR mergers, leasing everyhting that moves and just about any combination you
If I rememeber correctly from you other posts, this is 2.5X8 feet in HO, right? Have you checked your drawing against the actual space required for trackwork (handlaid or commercial)? To my eye it looks like some of those turnout frogs are #4 or sharper. In the crossovers, that could be a problem. Handlid turnouts can be built to virtually any angle, but that doesn’t mean that locos and cars will operate through them if they are too tight. In 1996 most railcars would be pretty long.
Track-to-track spacing also seems tight, but I did not scale it all out.
The gently curving tracks look good, but in some cases, trains traveling the diverging path of a turnout would experience an s-curve that might make operation less reliable.
Have you worked though how you’ll deliver cars to all the industry spurs? The runaround is of a decent length, but the tail tracks are a bit short in some cases, which might make for a lot of one- and two-car moves to switch some of the longer spurs. That might become tedious after a while.
It may be that you’ve worked all this through and have made good choices as to your design standards, so my concerns may be unwarrented. But eyeballing the sketch suggests these areas might be worth some consideration.
The turnouts into the runaround are #5’s (11.3deg), and the turnouts between the “main lines” are 10deg (close to #6, which is 9.5deg)
The tigher turnouts are built using 30" radii. The larger are 36" radii.
The minimum center to center distance between and two tracks is 2.25".
With this information, do you still see any red flags?
As for the potential of lots of moves required, I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s just life if I want to do what I’m trying to do on an 8ft long layout. Every track will at minimum hold a 6 axle diesel and 50ft boxcar (they’re represented in the picture by a couple blocks sitting on the track)
I think the turnouts may look shorter because I drew the track as the width of the ties, not the rail, so it all looks short & stubby, know what I mean? This makes the turnouts appear shorter.
Johncpo, I’m remembering you talking about your layout in the past. Sounds awesome. How about some pictures man!!!
It’s not the length of the turnouts that I noticed so much (that’s a little easier to “tweak” with handlaid anyway), it’s the angle. The crossovers in particular look sharper than #6. If you laid it out with a precision drawing program, then you’re probably fine. Just looks a little overly optimistic as to what can fit, but I could certainly be wrong.
I still think you’ll have some challenges where you curve the diverging leg away from a track already curving in the other direction.
My other point was that if the tail tracks only hold one car and an engine, then you’ll be doing a lot of onesy-twosey shuffling to switch the spurs. Not very realistic compared to the real world, but fine if it suits you, of course.
I totally appreciate the help. I want to make sure I’m not screwing up here…
Let me know if this picture makes more sense of everything. This represents the centerlines of the track.
The dimensions with a curved shape over them represent the length of the arc they’re dimensioning.
Also, please note the large radius is quite large: 310" (nearly 26ft raduis). It’s practically a non-radius. It’s just there to show off some smooth handlaying track (assuming it will be smooth
Does this make you feel better about the turnouts, s-curves, etc.?
It will sort of be the “rule” that big diesels don’t do anything other than ride the crossover from one “main line” to the other. They aren’t supposed to have to negotiate the runaround, etc. Although I’m secretly hoping they do!
If you’ve built intensive trackwork like this based on this type of drawing before, I guess that you know it will work. But I see potential problem areas.
First, actual trackwork geometry will prove different than simply lining up curves and points of intersections. By the time you allow for the actual physical requirements of operating turnouts, I don’t believe this will fit as drawn.
Second, you have s-curves at a number of points where a track is curving (relatively gently, true) in one direction, then enounters a sharp angle on the diverging turnout in the other direction. Again, because of the realities of actual turnout construction, these will need to be sharper angles (lower turnout numbers) than you have drawn. That will make for a sharper and perhaps more problematic s-curve (in my opinion).
I will further look into the geometry of turnouts.
To answer your question, no, I haven’t built them based on this type of drawing before. (But I’m a mechanical engineer, and have stuff built off of scaled drawings/models day in and day out).
Occasionally, a machinist throws a complaint my way, but that’s part of the job! In my case, I’ll be my own manufacturer, and may very well uncover some sore spots in the design.
I especially appreciate the comments about the S-curves, because although I’m pretty confident the turnouts could be built as shown (and will do more research before building - just found the NMRA standards), I don’t have the experience of knowing how the equipment will behave on the S-curves.
I would lose the back street, it doesn’t gain you anything and looses you an industry. The track curveing into the backdrop can’t be used because any car you spot on it will block the road completely.
Move the front road back 2 in and lose the back road. Put more depth into the buildings along the street and then the the track curving into the back drop can be along a building, between two buildings or into a building.
Scratch that, move the back set of parallel tracks back 2-3 inches and widen the road from the diamond to the right edge. That will allow you to park boxcars/reefers side by side on the tracks in the street and still have a way for vehicles to drive around them.
Take the stub track that goes off the left end and straighten it out, put a dock next to it or an overhead crane and make it a team track. Very versitile.
There is no runaround on the layout so there is no way to switch any cars out of the “yard” and spot them to any of the “industries” on the right hand end of the layout or to get cars from the interchange track along the front back into the yard unless you have 2 engines on the layout, one that only works left industries and one that only works right. Not a very common arrangement.
You have a good start. If you are handlaying your track there should be no problem with being able to build it. I think you ought to tinker with the design a tad more.
I see a runaround, unless I am mis-interpreting the drawing, formed betwwen the upper “mainline” and the parallel track in the street… It’s easier to see this on the “pretty” drawing than on the technical drawing. But it still is very difficult to switch cars between the “yard” and the long spur in the lower right if the module had to standalone sometimes … looks like you’d be doing it one car at a time … pretty tedious, as I mentioned earlier.
Otherwise, Dave makes (as usual) good comments that are worth considering.
I stand corrected, there is a runaround on the layout, I seperated the black tracks and grey tracks in my mind.
In the words of Emily Latella, “Never mind.”
a) it gives me an excuse to model any kind of building I’d like (I’ve been inspired by Pelle Soeborg’s modern buildings in MR lately - I could have a fast food joint on that street, but not on the “track” street - which is intended to be more of an industrial dirty alley.
b) I think it will add a lot of depth to the scene - 2 rows of buildings vs. 1
c) If I ever get trolley fever, I could maybe add a trolley car in that street.
I may actually shift everything forward a couple inches (I left a few inches of empty space on the front of the module) to give more depth to the flats - they could instead be 1/3 or 1/2 depth buildings with roof details, etc.
Thank you guys for your ideas. I’ll look into incorporating some of them.
I’m using a $4,000 mechanical design program. It won’t simulate the train running around, etc, but I could certainly model up a static version of a layout.
Also, I don’t want to learn a new CAD program that’s specifically designed for layout design, so I’m using what I know.
8 or 9 years ago I used another CAD program (Autocad - a basically 2D program) for writing out music. Crazy, huh?
