Portland Terminal Company-A layout design blog (formerly: New layout design), Comments/suggestions welcome

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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Portland Terminal Company photo Portland Terminal company 23 ft 5 by 15ft 2_zpsujvqbnjc.png

Layout design that I have been working on.

Specs:

Minimum radius (Main Line): 24" (mostly 26" and larger.

Minimum radius (Branch/non-mainline): 19"

Minimum radius (Spur): 15"

Code 83 track

Turnouts: Peco, Shinohara, Atlas

Layout type: point to point/terminal switching

Design is single deck, but may decide to add second deck modeling MEC Mountain division, the decks will not be connected.

Era: Circa 1945

Railroad: Protofreelanced Boston and Maine Central.

Blue lines are benchwork rough draft

Gray Box are no track areas/wall

Bottom Left side is SD Warren Paper Co, Westbrook, ME.

There will be a crossover from the arrival/departure track in RigbyYard to the main line. The software would not let me trim the Shinohara curved turnout to eliminate a 1 degree offset. This will be corrected during construction (likely will have to handlay all of the curved turnouts due to unavailablility).

Any one see any major issues?

Also why is Walthers writting “Out of Stock, no information from the manufacturer” on their own brand? Are they not in communication with their own factory contractor[#dots]

Red line is scenery divider: Right had side is Portland, ME CN (PTC trackage rights)/ Left hand side of divider is South Portland, ME.

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How about taking the bottom right dead end, turning it back and create a staging/fiddle yard beside the grey box? Then you could feed trains into your main yard and give them somewhere to go.

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I have considered that, unfortuneately there is a door to the furnace room immediately to the left of the blue line in that corner, and the door swings toward the left into the room…[:(]

I have obtained permission to punch through that wall into the furnace room (the furnace room is accessed by a ventilated door anyway, per code, so a 4" tall x2.5" wide hole next to it wont be a problem. I will have room for maybe two tracks if I decide to go that route. I will probably angle them across the furnace room to get the most out of their length, and to keep them away from the furnace. This piece will likely be stored under Rigby yard when not in use.

Also I fixed the Arrival/Departure track issue using a pair of PECO #8 turnouts. LH #8 is 9" in from the yard switch. Used a RH on the mainline (Diverging route is mainline).

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Drill track only holds 12 cars + GE 44ton. Yard sorting tracks are 20 cars long. Should I shorten yard tracks to fit the drill track or lengthen drill track. FWIW I think Pan AM drills on the right hand main line (that appeared to be what they were doing, but Im not sure, could have been doubling out). Dont know if that was the practice in the 1940s. Track arrangement has not changed that much since 1940, I added in the drill track to make life easier on the yardmaster.

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I made some changes to Rigby Yard, most notably I increased the track spacing somewhat and double ended about half of the tracks.

The track jutting in to the aisles are piers along Commercial Street. I made some edits to the benchwork outline to improve reach to some of the industries.With Double Ended yard photo Portland Terminal company 23 ft 5 by 15ft 2 double ended yard_zpsbjtekqip.png

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After discussion with the other half of the railroad management some additional modifcations were made:

Piers were swapped to facing point from Rigby to allow Yard 8 (the one at the top) to be moved down to provide scenery space. Track spacing was adjusted in yard 8. Minimum separation between tracks is now 1.88" (1 or 2 parallel tangent tracks), with most being greater than 1.92". Curve tracks are between 2" and 2.1" spacing will be adjusted if necessary, but I dont have any articulated locomotives, mostly small just small steam and 4 axle diesels, so this is less of a concern at the moment.

Lakes class steamer (Walthers) is planned to parallel to the pier at yard 8).

I reworked the SD Warren Paper company tracks to minimize the reach in, and make better use of the corner of the room ( the aisle was only a foot wide, and I realized there is a knee wall (actually a hip wall @39" that sticks out 1’ on 3 sides of the room) so that 1’ wasnt actually accesible anyway.

Edit:

I appologize for the poor quality of the photographs, RR track software only allows me to export to BMP files. I could try printing screen to MS Paint.

photo Portland Terminal company 23 ft 5 by 15ft 2 double ended yard Version2_zpskdsa4wsm.png

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I used Shinohara curved turnouts in this plan…

http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/78451.aspx

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Not knowing anything about that prototype, it looks like a great pland for that type of operation.

Sheldon

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Maybe I see something that isn’t there, but will you have to duck under the middle part of the benchwork in order to follow a train?

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Yes some sort of -under. I would post my most recent revision, but photobucket keeps logging me out when I click “upload”. Also I try to upload via the library area I get a failure at 90% loaded.

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They fixed it.

photo Portland Terminal company 23 ft 5 by 15ft 2 double ended yard v1.3_zpsskktd7oo.png

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Changes that were made to the layout:

Rigby yard was reduced in size and shifted down to give more room for Portland area.

Portland was expanded to provide additional car spots.

Paper mill was re-designed with more car spots.

Curve radius around Rigby was increased to 28" Curve spacing was increased from 2" to 2.25 or so.

#6.5 Shinohara turnouts were removed due to the previous posted link about the inside radius being mis-stated. They were replaced with Peco Code 100 turnouts, due to Code 83 turnouts not being in the RR track software.

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Staging will be in an adjacent furnace room, on a removable module to allow access to the furnace for servicing. There is only room for 1 track between studs in the wall between the furnace room and the layout room.

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Most of these changes were driven by a professional design consultant. I decided I wanted an objective opinion from someone who does this regularly, as Im not really an “expert” at layout design.

There are some trade offs with this design. The -under being one of them. I call it a -under because if I had the option I would make it a nod, but the wife wants a second deck. Im not so sure that we need a second deck as this is already quite a bit of railroad to operate. The decks will not be physically connected if constructed.

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I also simplified the Wye because it was eating up too much space. Minimum aisle clearance is 26" in one area. 28" + in most other areas.

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V1.4

Added Portland Union Station trainshed to hide the fact that tracks end at a wall instead of continuing to Augusta/Waterville/Bangor area.

This past weekend my wife and I took a trip to Portland, and visited the Thompsons Point area. The original Portland and Ogdensburg shop building is still standing (circa 1905 I believe). Due to a flower show, I was able to go inside and take photographs of the building construction, as well as 360 degree outside photos (need to go back when there arent a bunch of cars in the way.

As a little bonus. A section of the original union station train shed has been preserved, and serves as roof over an open air ice skating rink. I also got photos of that, when the rink is finished, I should be able to get closeups for scratchbuilding purposes.

Back to the plan.

I was digging through my salvaged turnouts from my previous layout and inventorying them. I have enough to do this layout in code 100, with some left overs. I really want to go with 83, but dropping $2,000+ on turnouts (again) seems like a waste. I was considering going with fastracks turnouts throughout. I could sell the code 100 on ebay or something, which would likely yield enough cash to cover the cost of the nescessary fast tracks jigs/construction aids (I have a few already).

I am not entirely happy with the alignment revision near the station. That track arrangement is closer to the post-1953 alignment when new highway and new rail bridge were constructed across the Fore River. I also loose the opportunity to put an interlocking tower on a pile trestle, along with turnouts and symaphore signals.

Rigby Yard was originally constructed in 1926 to consolidate switching operations and to replac

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Well, didn’t realize my photobucket links were dead.

This railroad is on hold. I’ll revisit it in a few years if I move to a larger house with a space to build the kind of Portland that I want.