Dave,
I’m very impressed with your artwork! You sure you didn’t pay Ian Rice to draw that? Looks like a great plan, best of luck as you build it.
Regards, Ray
I have some concerns about the grades as shown. At the left, rising from ¾” to 3” in about 54” is over 4% (and effectively a bit more because of the curve). That by itself may be what you intend, but note that you don’t really have room to ease back out of that steep grade, so the spurs will still be on a pretty steep grade rolling back towards town. You might need to look at some way of holding cars on the hill. Of course, you could reduce the grade there without impacting the plan.
More troublesome might be the grade across the main part of the layout. You show 1” at right and the track going up from there, but it’s down to ¾” at the left side of the siding.
Additionally, the track is a bit steep moving up from the 0” location to the ¾” spot.
Once you allow for transitions from level-to-grade and avoiding changing grades within a turnout, I don’t see that the planned elevations work, but perhaps I am reading your plan incorrectly.
The last time I mentioned grades to a poster there was a big kerfuffle, so I hope that you can accept these concerns as simply an attempt to help.
Good luck with your layout.
Byron
DeeCee - May I join Byron in voicing some concern? IIRC, I already mentioned that O scale building have about 4 times the footprint of an HO scale building. While I like your plan very much, I think there are some pretty tight spots and the buildings you have drawn appear to be too small for the scale.
Out of my own experience I can only recommend to make scale cardboard mock-ups for the structures before starting to build the layout.
I did this after the track was down and ballasted and ended up “killing” the layout.
Ulrich makes a good point about the size for 3-D structures in O scale. Also note the track-to-track spacing and the distance needed between tracks and structures are larger in On30 than in HO and may not be adequate in your rendering in a few spots.
Thanks a lot gentlemen. I see I goofed in the elevations - I didn’t intend for the right side to be higher than the left and then dip down before crossing the trestle. I hear what you are saying about clearances but maybe I don’t understand or get it and that won’t come until I build some mock ups. Definitely will have to do that before building. I will draw another plan but in a larger scale that may allow me to better plan clearances. I won’t be able to scan that one, unfortunately, for comments. Some problems I am seeing for clearance will be the depot backing on to the retaining wall; perhaps the engine service facility might be too bunched together; crate and barrel can be pushed more into the backdrop so I don’t see that being an issue - anything else? I was using building dimensions from other plans as a guide, so I’m assuming the building sizes are OK. As far as elevations go, I hadn’t considered the transitions so I will have to do that. What do I allow - couple of inches? As mentioned, I don’t need 3" on the left side and can drop that without affecting the layout. I was planning on a 2.5% grade - ish. I wonder if the big warehouse on the wharf might be too much and will end up blocking everything behind it? It only leaves a narrow corridor on the right side to peer down to the covered bridge. Thanks again, folks.
Dave
Dave,
When you redraw the plan, don´t forget to allow about 4" for clearance - that´s 2" on each side of the center line of the track. This will help you to see how much “real estate” you really have for buildings.
Maybe. There are many poorly planned and incorrectly rendered layouts on the Internet, so they can be misleading. You might measure your planned strucures in O scale feet to decide if they are large enough for you.
Unfortunately, significantly more than that for best reliability. I have had good luck with about one car length of transition for each per cent of grade, others have gotten by with less. Also, I try to allow one car length away from a turnout before changing grade.
As for buildings, I was using the drawings of Pat Harriman for dimensions and scaling them into O scale. I thought I read somewhere that I needed 3" between centrelines for double track but I will go with 4" - thanks for that.
Sounds like I need to some more planning for my elevations and vertical easements. So if I understand Cuyama, for a 2.5% grade, I would need 2.5 car lengths or about 16"-18" for the easement. Now is distance at the start, end, and middle of the curve? If so, my track would need 3’ of easement - half at the beginning and half at the top?
Dave
Whatever length you choose, you need an easement at each end of each grade, as shown in the drawing. The middle is the grade itself.
I’m starting to think that I need to abandon the idea of elevation except for what little I can get from the left side of town after the turnout and then maybe from the middle of town right to the covered bridge. 
So, taking the comments under advisement, I’ve come up with another revised plan. I drew this one at 1 inch to a foot. Elevations have decreased and (I think) buildings have more room. I tried to draw the turnouts as accurately as I could but I imagine that the angles will not be quite right and things will change once I lay out the track in “real time”. I am hoping that using a cookie cutter sub bed will build in the vertical easements I need. I am not sure how else to figure it out. Maybe I will have to live with little to no vertical height change, or get relief by dropping the bottom.
The grades still seem a little too aggressive, but this is closer to something that would be buildable. Try leaving room for transitions, measuring lengths of grade to scale, and then see what elevations result. I think it will be less than you hope (with reasonable grades), but there will be room for some variation in elevation.
Good luck with your layout.
I took the liberty of putting your track plan into SCARM.
I still think you need more real estate for buildings …
Edit:
A couple of more views:
Ulrich, that’s awesome! Thanks. I am starting to get the picture (literally). I thought leaving 8 scale feet between buildings would be adequate, but apparently not. Next step, a roll of craft paper and some real-life scaling.
Dave,
I don´t know how computer savvy you are, but you could download SCARM (it´s for free) and do the same job on jour computer.
Your layout is not much different to what I had started to build.
While it looked fine on the drawing, it pretty soon proved to have not enough room for correctly sized buildings. The buildings I scratchbuilt looked like caricatures of buildings.
I was able to sell the layout and retrieve some money I had put into it, but in the end it was more than a year´s of work down the drain!
I have a hunch that your layout will suffer from the same fate. It looks OK on paper, but later on …
Before starting to draw anything, make those cardboard mock-ups and see whether you will be happy with the dimensions and the looks of them.
You may not like this, but if that´s all the room you can dedicate to a layout, I think you´ll be much better of with HO scale.
I don’t think SCARM works on a Mac… I have no intent on filling a basement with half-finished railroad and my original intent was to build modules that could grow into something more if I had the inclination or space. I wanted to have a “final” plan to grow into (or towards) as opposed to random modules. For now, that is all the space I want to devote to it. Maybe I have to have less ambitious modules (ie less track and more space). I am grateful for all the comments and I am hoping that I will get a better feel once I plan in “real time”.
Dave,
I was beginning to think I might have frightened you away…
Your “less is more approach” is the right attitude , as is having a kind of master plan for a layout built in segments. What you need to know is how much space you may eventually have one fine day for that layout. Having a rough idea will be sufficient and also having a rough idea of what the layout may look like in it´s final stage. Maybe you need to do some more thinking on that, before you can actually start with one or two segments of that layout. Take your time and look around for some inspiration. A first start could be Laurie Green´s Snake River RR & Navigation Co.
Sorry, SCARM is not available for Mac.
Thanks, Ulrich. I had seen Laurie’s track plan but, without dimensions, I wasn’t sure how big it was. In fact, I have his web page bookmarked and go back and drool every so often. It SEEMS (and maybe that is the beauty of good design) that he has a lot packed in to a small space. Perhaps if I stretched the middle and made a “U”. The second leg would certainly be a “future production” since the current room won’t take to having windows and fireplace covered. By the way, from your pictures, I didn’t think your buildings looked like caricatures of real ones.
They would have been fine as background semi-flats, but not standing on a pier!
I made mock-ups for the rest of the buildings I had planned and decided to let go of the layout. It just didn´t look right to my eyes.
The reason I decoded to go into On30 scale was because I thought it would be easier to handle with my ageing eyes - how wrong I was. I hadn´t thought that the bigger the scale you are modeling i n is, the more detail you have to include. Here they were again, those tiny details I thought I was not able to handle any longer.
So I finally got some time to re-visit my layout. I have been trying to come up with alternate (and possibly less complicated) layouts. My lovely spouse started throwing out alternate uses for what was going to be a train room so I couldn’t pin down available space. I am now thinking that having a final layout to built to will not be possible so that just having a couple of modules might be a better way to go. That might mean just running a train back and forth for a while.
The point of this is to see if I can figure out which turnouts to use. If I’m going to do some 1:1 planning I need to know what size my turnouts will be. My local Hobby shop can get Peco On30. If I go to a handlaid track like the ones from Fast Tracks it seems not only more expensive but they seem to physically take up more real estate. The Pecos seem pretty short. I was wondering if anyone had experience with either.