Tracked into a corner

[UncBob]

How much space do you have between the back corner of the engine house and the main line? Do you have enough to put a single lane dirt road coming in from behind? that would kind of simulate the road paralleling the track for a couple hundred yards originating at the edge of the layout and terminating at the area you are trying to get crew access to.

How much space do you have between the back corner of the engine house and the main line? Do you have enough to put a single lane dirt road coming in from behind? that would kind of simulate the road paralleling the track for a couple hundred yards originating at the edge of the layout and terminating at the area you are trying to get crew access to.

Yep that would work and had crossed my mind

[Allegheny2-6-6-6]

Uncle Bob,

I recommend you pick up Kalmbach’s book by Marty McGuirk "The Model Railroaders guide to Locomotive Servicing Terminals. It’s a great reference book for knowing where to place what in your engine facility such as sand house locations, cinder & ash pits, inspection pits, water columns etc. tons of great information worth every nickle in my o/p. That being said a common mistake a lot of modelers make is not making a scene look believable, building some times just seem to spring up out of the ground with no viable way to ace’s them. In some cases large facilities such as steel mills had a crew train and or motor car that would bring in the crews of workers at shit changes. Thing like this were done generally because you don’t want people driving around a place as hazardous as a steel mill, but an engine svc. terminal would most definitely have an access road. In your case it really doesn’t have to go any where but you could make it come from the fascia on the isle side into the facility. This way you don’t have to be concerned with crossing tracks etc. You have to remember some thing we often overlook. The isle or area in which you stand really isn’t there, from a modeling standpoint. Think of it as your standing in a lot or a field or on a hillside what ever looking down on or into that particular scene. Of course you can’t put things like structures or scenery there but there’s nothing stopping you from having roads or bridges etc. appearing to continue into the space when they actually terminate at the end of the fascia. When that was pointed out to me a while back it gave me a whole new perspective on how I look at my railroad.

[richhotrain]

UncBob

You could put a curved turnout at the point of your inner track at the bottom of the photo. Then, move down the water tower on the new access track toward the curved turnout, add a sanding tower and an ash pit, then the turntable and finally, the engine house, leaving it where it already sits.

Rich

What radius is a curved turnout

The inner track is 4 sections of Atlas 22 radius

In addition I only have 13 inches from the edge of the table to the inner mainline

Turn table doesn’t seem do-able

May have to live with the engines backing into the service yard off the main or conversely backing onto the main

UncBob,

Oops, from your photo, it looked like you had more space than 13 inches. The Walthers 90’ turntable is almost 14 inches in diameter, so that wouldn’t work.

The smallest curved turnout that I know of is the Walthers Shinohara with an outside radius of 24" and an inside radius of 20", just a bit too big for the outside radius to work on your inner 22" radius track curve.

I think that it is time for us to stop trying to reconstruct your layout for you. LOL.

Back to your original question which was how to provide an access road for your workers. How did you resolve that issue?

Rich

[UncBob]

Probably go with a road from the left that doesn’t have to cross the tracks like Allegheny 2666 suggested above