After seven years attempting to design the perfect track plan, i’ve come up with one that passes the test, simple yet effective. I found it necessary to discard bad design habits incurred during my early days and discard most current thought on layout design, you know, gotta have massive yards with ample stagging, heck let’s adopt the helix and give it a national holiday.
Back to basics, around the wall with center pennisula, branch line theme, not over two feet deep at any point, single track with ample switching (but using only 25 turnouts) a two track interchange yard (one to fiddle equiptment on/off the layout) Doesn’t get much better in my mind, all this in a 20 X 12 space with no obstrusive duckunders or liftups.
Dave
Modeling the mighty SP in S scale, well a small slice of it at least!!
That’s great but let me give you a word of advice. The plan may look perfect on paper but you need to actually lay it out on the floor of your train room to see if it fits the space and you have wide enough aisles and the door into and out of that space can still open and close.
Congratulations! Track planning can be frustrating at times, so glad to see you have something you can move forward with. I gave up on trying to come up with the perfect plan, so I just came up with one that is “good enough” and will not be finalized until I start laying track on the actual layout. By the way, just don’t get frustrated if you do have to make adjustments and tweaks to the track plan when you actually start building–as others have said, rarely does the plan end up looking exactly as it was drawn. Jamie
Snap! I came up with pretty much the same conclusion after many many years planning spaghetti bowel disasters with tight radius curves trying to fit more than physically possible into a given space. Good to see someone else on the same wavelength, the big advantage to me is being able to have large radius curves to link all my LDE’s together creating a more realistic representation of my prototype.
Yes, all the trendy “have to” things come and go as time marches on. Most if not almost all layout’s I’ve seen put here to review are over yarded and under operatiable (is that a word?).
I’m glad the original poster has come up with a plan he likes.
But to be fair, many of those layouts are put here for review by relative newcomers to design. I’d hardly characterize those as the leading edge in layout design.
If one thinks that “the most current thought on layout design” only includes massive visible yards and stacks of helixes, they might be missing out on the wider range of thoughtful ideas coming from groups like the Layout Design SIG. I often see newbies to model railroad layout design assuming one-size-fits-all and they just gotta have a helix to make their plan look “advanced”. But that’s diametrically opposed to what’s actually being suggested by the folks I know who think about layout design a lot. Instead, they look at the needs and opportunities of a particular concept and space, and suggest elements accordingly. Even multideck plans don’t automatically mean a helix, for example my HOn3 Oahu Railway plan from MRP 2008 offers 2- or 3-decks with the connections between decks suggested by modest hidden staging – nary a helix in sight. And that’s just one of a number of alternatives.
I guess sometimes it’s fun to take the anti-elitist position and feel proud about that. Perfectly fine. But what you guys are saying doesn’t really accurately depict “the most current thoughts in layout design” – at least not the thoughts shared around the campfires I frequent.
Thanks for posting the design SIG. I just joined because I’m beginning to design a new layout for a new home. I have a whole list of things that I do or don’t want but really no real plan in mind yet.