Here’s some track plans I’ve made when doodling. All are hand drawn and done freehanded. (No protractor so turns are a little rougher than they should be). My goal is to get a trackplan into the magazine. I figured I’d scan these and show them off to gauge how I’m doing.
KANSAS, OKLAHOMA & SOUTHERNS Dodge City - Lubbock Main.
The KO&S is a protofreelanced class I line. This particular model represents a portion of the lines Lubbock, TX / Dodge City, KS main and includes the fictional town of Bronze Hammer, OK, where it interchanges with its ownBoise City, OK / Woodward, OK line, and the prototypical town of Liberal Kansas, where it interchanges with the Rock Island. the Layouts time frame is set in 1978-1984 with the end of the Rock and the start of UP Dominance in the west. Operations are centered around the KO&S’s attempts to turn a profit when your interchange partners are dying or getting swallowed up.
NORFOLK, CAROLINA, &DANVILLE plus the MECKLENBERG & CONCORD
The NC&D/M&C is an excercise in trying to find balance. Balance between letting the trains run in a circle and prototype style operations. The NC&D is a proto-freelanced Regional centered mostly in NC & Virginia that I actually plan on using once I get my layout started. the line around “the Walls” is the NC&D’s mainline from Charlotte, NC eastward. the penninsula is fictional Carolina shortline “The Mecklenberg & Concord” which surprisingly is actually inspired by the Vandalia railroad in Illinois.
Very nice job on all of them. You could probably fit in a loop or a horseshoe curve on the peninsulas instead of having them dead end. It would allow you to have a longer mainline and give you the ability to stay with your train while walking around the room.
You don’t need a protractor, what you need is a drafting compass. You can find these at office supply stores. With them you can draw curves that match your minimum radius.
Nice plans. I think you got a bit aggressive on the frogs and curve radius in the peninsulas of the first two plans. Stretching them about 18 more inches could probably cure it.
There’s also a few wicked as drawn frogs along parts of the mainlines, but there is enough space to draw them properly with little impact to the plan, IMO.
so are you just trying to come up with novel track plans, or something you would like? Even if a plan is intended to model a real railroad, it needs to make sense as an operable model railroad.
here are some well designed trackplans in the space you have. Both of these are relatively simple. They don’t have crowded sections of track or unnecessary trackwork.
i liked your idea in your Dakota & Wyoming plan that each side of the pennisula is served by separate branches from different sides of the layout. I like the idea that even though tracks are near one another on the layout, they are far apart in terms of trackwork. This isn’t the case in your Norfolk plan; there is a crossover from the siding leading to the pennisula to the mainline.
Having staging in Kansas is a good idea. I think the other plans would benefit if they had some.
But couldn’t the staging tracks be longer if they were between the wall and mainline, and extended to the end of the layout.
And if the length of the staging tracks in Kansas is indicative of the length of trains, shouldn’t the length of sidings be similar?
The lower shelf staging in D&W needs to consider the grade between the main and staging shelves.
while you have at least 2 mainline sidings on several plans, The Dakota Plains plan more clearly supports two trains running in opposite directions. It may be better if they were located more opposite one another, perhaps m
