As I start planning my new lay out for the new room in the new house, I am looking at a lot of track plans to get ideas. One thing I have noticed is that the grid lines on the MR generated plans do not extend across the layout itself. This really hit home when I looked at the Virginian plan in the January 2012 issue. It notes the scale, and the grid as 12". But there is no grid at all, I assume as there are no room walls shown on the plan where the grid lines in faint blue are located on other MR plans.
The only exception I have noted is for the plans drawn by Iain Rice. All his have grid lines extending across the actual plan itself, not just confined to the room edges like the other MR plans.
Personally, I find having it the way Mr. Rice does it to be extremely helpful in interpreting the plan, and seeing what elements might fit in my plan.
So my question is simple: any one know why the grid lines do not go across the MR plans? Some logical reason I am missing? And does anyone else miss them?
The obvious remedy (if you are unable to just interpolate between the lines in your head) is to print the plan on paper, take a ruler and pen, and just complete the lines
I suspect the grid lines would make the plan awfully busy, and detract from the rendering of scenic suggestions. I agree that the grad lines would help with technical aspects of track planning.
Sometimes when I post layout suggestions on the web, I include two copies of the plan-- one with rendering of how the layout will appear and be scenicked, and another “clean” one for the technical aspects of track laying. I did this once to show how to fit sectional track on a small layout that had a couple of track alinements that might be counterintuitive to beginners…
Personally, I have more objection to MR layout plans having place/ station names out in the margun or aisle space, where it is sometimes to difficult to tell exactly to which track it refers… for instance if there is a track on a lower level close to the aisle, and a track set back against the BG and a few inches above the front track, that is supposed to be miles and miles away operationally— and the name of the station is written in the aisle part of the plan for “neatness” but it does not refer to the part of the layout to which it is nearest…
I just happened to have Kalmbach’s 43 Trackplans readily available so I hauled it out and perused the trackplans located therein.
Kalmbach is currenttly only griding the unplatformed area of the layout room. Back in the Stone Age they used to grid the whole layout area but that drew complaints so at sometime in the past they went to the current procedure.
If you are considering burning an out-of-magazine copy upon which to impose grid lines you need to realize that they may be doing the grid lines in nonreproducable blue and therefore you need to lay a straightedgo of some sort along the printed grid lines on the magazine article and pen yourself in some registration markings along the room borders.
Good idea but kind of tough to do when browsing on a plane or ferry as I do a lot of this type of planning while traveling.
43 Trackplans is one I have as well; and in it Mr. Rice’s plans all have grids, as do his plans in other compilations.
I have yet to try copying any of the MR plans on a copier, but I was also wondering if the faint blue lines would show up. I did a fair bit of draughting back in the day and blue was not reproducible on blue prints.
Easy enough to work around, thanks for the insight so far!
I think the grid change occurred about the same tiem they started doign renderings for each plan rather than just showing a 22 dimenstional represenation of the track and structures. It would be pretty busy and hard to see if those lines went all over as well.
FOr planning when not at a nice desk with drawing tools, read up on John Armstrong’s “squares” method. So logn as you don;t cheat on your initial space measurement, what fits in a ‘square’ is pretty much fixed - as far as circles, half circles, quater circles, etc. and ladders of various size turnouts. So you don;t have to draw the track precisely, especially when at the “doodle” stage, yet you know it will fit even when redrawn with accuracy because you didn;t try to, sya, add 3 extra tracks outside the curve. A very useful thing to know, so that even casual doodles on the back of an envelope or napkin will be workable, at least space-wise, and not some fanciful wishful thinking.
No, not really. If I’m just looking at a plan, it’s easier to “get” it if there is no grid. If I were to get more serious about it, I would probably scale off the plans. If I got REALLY serious, a grid might be useful, but I’d rather overlay my own grid. I might make it at 12" spacing, or I might make it at min radius spacing. And I would prefer to be able to move the grid around, either with a paper overlay or on the computer.
I think the plans should come with overall dimensions so that I can figure out the scale. They usually do. But even if they didn’t, I can usually pick up the idea and incorporate it into a plan. It would be quite a co-incidence if a significant portion of a track plan just happened to exactly fit into a space on my layout plan.
The first thing I do when I look at a track plan is to check out the length of sidings and spurs using the grid to figure out potential operations.
I’m always amazed when the track plan is a class I mainline railroad say from 1950’s to the present, and the passing sidings will barely hold the engine consists and a couple of cars.
That’s why I’m a fan of Tony K’s yearly issue of Model Railroad Planning which lists the train length for a given layout plan and I can then check it out against the length of the passing sidings.
I know we always have to compress our plans to fit a given space but sometimes it’s better to be a little realistic.
I rather suspect that one source of heartburn with grid lines on the actual layout involved either mistaking a grid line for a track or having a designed track fall onto a grid line. Then the inevitable question would be, “What size turnout d I have to use at X?” - X being the place where the designed track curved away frm the grid line.
The immediate correlary to the above is, “Why don’t you have an industry shown for that (nonexistent) siding?”
My own layout planning is done on blue-line quadrille paper - and I allow plenty of slack. In my experience, NO whole-layout paper track plan ever survives the first contact between ties and roadbed.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - mostly winging it to a general plan)
In this case the logical reason they are not on the January track plan is because they are shown on pages 36 and 37 of the March issue where they specify the different turnouts, track, and structures.
