OK, I’ve taken the suggestions of this week and incorporated them into my future living room fixture, a 10’ 6" x 2’ switching layout:
Recent changes include:
Putting some curve into the storage tracks, P&LE RR connection, Oil Street Branch connection, and PRR interchange tracks. As pointed out by TZ real tracks aren’t always straight, and frankly lots of straight, parallel tracks look too much like a schematic to me. My prototype was relatively “curvy”, so that’s the way I went.
2: Added structures. I’ve kept the same names and industries as before: Valley Clay Products, Beaver Falls Crane and Excavator, The Weatherproof Varnish Company, and a freight station. (I may change the varnish industry to another chemical plant like the Sunshine Soap Company, Grasseli Acid Works, Pennzoil Company, or Sinclair Refining, all of which were present in real life.)
I worked out the rolling stock requirements (well, desires) for the layout. I figured to have 3x my available number of spots to start. (Why 3x? That would allow swapping out cars of a like type in one session without just rotating the same two, it gives me a rationale to buy a nice number of cars, and, three seemed to be as good a number as any!) At any rate, my fleet will consist of
It’s come a long way. As for the hoppers, it does not seem implausible that there would be all kinds of cars that a train would bring into that area that would not be switched there. Of course, a dedicated coal drag would be a pushing the envelope a little.
On a side note, the layout is so cool, I think it would drive me nuts that there is not room for staging on each end. With staging, you could increase your ops about a billion percent. You couldn’t bust through a wall on one side and put staging over the stove or something and on the other straddle the toilet.
Sure, there are other businesses and sidings that use hoppers on the line, I just don’t know what necessarily to do with these cars during my session. The whole Marginal Branch is less than two miles long. If a switch job brought hoppers along they would just deliver them. On the model they’d either have to be left at the storage track or just run around for the ride, neither of which seems realistic.
Well, for one thing it’s in the living room, and we don’t have a toilet in there. . .[:)]
I was planning on using cassettes (modular, removable, single track staging) at the PRR interchange track. This is where the yard switcher would naturally enter the scene anyway. If the rule is that the interchange track must be clear when the switch job isn’t working, then what I’ll do is load up a switcher, five cars, and a cabin and drive them onto the layout, do the switching, gather up the outgoing and drive off the same way.
I like your idea of using the staging as an industry unto itself. . . I could certainly hook one up on the P&LE RR as the destination for hoppers - Thanks for the idea, SM!
