Also everything is labeled now! Main in black, branches in red. The redesign of the furnace room wall is shown. Walls around the layout are in sky blue (though wierdly, in 3D view only the north wall looks that color, the others are all darker, yet I picked the same color from the picker). Only thing I didn;t put in is the main yard along the south wall, and some town tracks/industry opposite the yard, on the south side of the center penninsula.
Main line on the east wall it now just goes straight up to the north wall where it emerges from under the branch. The branch on that side is the more ambitious of the two. There are some tracks along the diagonal for sorting cars dfropped off by the mainline train, then it curves away from the main, loops around the cement plant as it climbs over itself, and then there is a yard along the north wall before it heads into two staging tracks. If this look slightly familiar, it’s because I modeled it somewhat on the C&F that was the subject of my previous layout. I’ve got one other industry spot, and will come up with some others, possibly another in the upper right corner. Grade is a hair over 2%
The other branch, I’m not as sure of. This is to be a sort of simple single-ended coal branch. I have it coming off the main and looping inside the penninsula blob to gain height, then a long diagonal bridge crossing the main. It loops around above the main (possibly exposed on the inside of the curve, and then back into a tunnel under the area I marked for a coal breaker. Finally turns the corner, goes through the liftup section where the main once again is exposed, and ends with a short runaround. I want to locate a couple of smaller coal loadouts along here as well, a single a s doublt truck dump at least, possibly a slightly higher volume loader, but the highlight is the breaker, I will be modifying a Walthers new River Mine. Grade on this branch comes out to 2.5%.
Turnouts off the main used by mainline trains are #8 -
The way you have the lines crossed at the entrance to the peninsula will make things difficult for an operator following his train. You have put consideration into other areas of the plan to avoid congestion. I don’t think this track arrangement is consistent with that spirit.
I just don;t see how to get a penninsula in there if I don’t flip-flop it like that. If I start a solid curve right after the main connection and try to loop around, I’m going to be pinching the aisle at the top.
I don;t think it’s so different from trying to follow your train on the main - you go past the furnace room and then you have to go around tot he other side of the penninsula to the upper right where your train reappears.
“The other branch, I’m not as sure of. This is to be a sort of simple single-ended coal branch. I have it coming off the main and looping inside the penninsula blob to gain height, then a long diagonal bridge crossing the main. It loops around above the main (possibly exposed on the inside of the curve, and then back into a tunnel under the area I marked for a coal breaker. Finally turns the corner, goes through the liftup section where the main once again is exposed, and ends with a short runaround.”
It looks to me if the end of both branches are close to the same level, both under the main at the stagging wye. How about taking the end of the coal branch into the laundry room into a small stagging yard of it’s own, like the other branch is? (Under the main stagging)
I guess I could wye them together the way they main is. Both would be above main staging - the cement brank is at a max of 5" above the mnian, the coal branch is at 6" the way it is. I didn’t think overhanging 2 tracks with not much more than minimal clearance would be a big deal, but overhanigng 4 tracks - now the access to the main staging is going to suffer.
If you don’t want the looping peninsula, try originating the peninsula off of the other side, by the stairs. It might be a little tight around the wye, but you’ve got a lot of space along the bottom of the stairs.
Yes once posted it looks the same no matter what. The difference is, I originated the thread in Chrome, and it put the escape code in. I’ve posted thread titles with ’ in them before with IE and it stays with the ’ character.
There’s about 3 feet less width on that side, because of the stairs. The main and the coal branch cross the stairs, but that will be on a lift-up section for access to the room. Maybe a swinging gate will be easier, but I have the ceiling height to have it lift straight up to be a walkunder for anyone 6’ or less.
Thanks for the clarification Randy. I use Chrome as my primary browser but lately I’ve noticed a lot of glitches with other sites. I may go back to IE.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be comfortable with that either. I wouldn’t want to mess up the flow or give up the mainline mileage. I’d loop the mainline out onto the peninsula and make the branch an inner loop like you did on the other one.
I’m just thinking here and making sure you thought of all options. Your very first plan posted here, way back, I think had that bottom peninsula snaking up through the entire middle section of the basement, sort of looping where the cement plant is now. Now that the furnace room has been moved back, you might want to see of that would fit better. I think that would give you more main line run and the ability to flow with the train.
Well, back to the helix - after seeing the East Bay plan in MRP 2015, I thought maybe I could make use of the ramps to stanging idea, but that would make a lot of hidden track as there are really only 2 places with enough length for a switch ladder and staging tracks under the main layout area - the very top and the very bottom.
So I got to thinking, what about a 2 turn helix (at 30+" radius, 2% grade gets me 8 inches in 2 turns) and put the staging under the part of the layout along the top. Using a helix greatly reduces the encroachment in the laundry room, which is a plus, and keeps almost 100% of the railroad in “my” part of the basement. A downside is that this reduces the number of staging tracks from 9 to 8, however even the shortest one is longer than the longest one before, and the two longest ones are more than long enough to serial stage 2 trains on each track.
I have it roughed in in the drawing, but not ready to post, takes me a while to get the helix to actually helix - that’s maybe one area where 3rd PlanIt isn’t horribly intuitive. Plus I goofed on the original mainline and have it all 6" too low, so I need to properly set the height of the maina nd branch before I set the helix levels. Mocking up some boxes giving me 6" of clearance from the lower railhead to the top (meaning the upper benchwork and roadbed could be as much as 2" thick), I can seemingly easily reach in, so the 8" between levels seems like it would be plenty for staging purposes
Randy, that “cement plant” loop could be angled further toward the south wall easing the incoming radius and posssibly eliminating the need for an at grade diamond. Not sure how wide you plan for that south wall benchwork, but it looks to be rather narrow and no problem w/ isle width. The end loop of the middle penninsula can be moved southward as well for the isle clearance to the cement area. Min radius appears to be 28"
Come quite a long way and plan is looking great.
BTW, where is the other lally column? Looks that there should be something in the isle near the cement loop. Quite a large span for the main beam w/o one.
There will be the main yard along the bottom wall. I was trying to keep about a 4’ aisle there so people could get past the yard crew. But the middle penninsula may come down a bit - it’s also a bit narrownow that I looped the branch through there, and I was planning on putting a town with some switching opportunities there.
The cement loop - that’s not an at-gread diamond, as the track loops around the penninsula, outside of where the cement plant will be, it climbs, so that’s a bridge over the lower track there.
There’s only one column, somewhere around the east side of the short wall in the middle - that wall is currently longer but I am going to cut it back. It’s possible there are two, one at each end of the wall as it exists now, but I don’t think so. The wall where the door to the garage is is another block wall and is the end of the basement area and supports that end of the main beam. Definitely nothing near the cement loop - from inside the furnace room, the beam is completley visible and for the current width of the furnace room (the top where this drawing has the wall diagonal - it’s currently squared off to the width shown by the wall with the door on it). There is no columb between the outside wall and there. If you go back and look at my initial plans, I have that center wall drawn out to how it stands today. Between the furnace room and that wall is an open archway, so no column there. If it is anywhere but close to the middle, it would be about 4 lines to the right of the ends of the middle wall. Because of the way the paneling wa sput up, until i rip it out I can’t exactly see where it is. From east to west, it’s a total of 36 feet. If it happens to be where I think it could be, then it would be 15’ fromt he east wall, and if there was then a second between there and the garage, there would only be 10’ and 11’ spans. Unless the PO pulled a John Allen and removed one near the furnace room, meaning there would
OK curiosity got the better of me. If you go back to one of my original plans, when I showed that middle wall at full length - between that wall and the wall of the furnace room, it was covered in a construct of 3 pieces of dimensional lumber and some quarter roud to make it look like rough beams (there’s even 45 degree angle braces, aka headknockers, at the corners. So, what I just did was cut a piece of that waway so I could either see behind it or pull out the paneling to see behind it. The supporting structure for this fake beam is a frame of 2x4 and 2x3, to either side of the main steel beam. I was able to peak in behindthis on the stair side and - no lally column. As fas back as I could see, no column (but I could only see a foot or so past the opening I made. I am somewhat convinced now that the solumn lies at the center of the span, 18 feet in from either side. There is most definitely no column from the east wall to the wall of the furnace room - on the firnace room side of the wall, the column is completely exposed (well, that side, and the bottom). No column there. Now, the merits or lack thereof of just 1 column in an 18 foot span, I don’t know., The house was built in 1972 and there is no noticeable sag in the floors above. Also, I need to measure them, but the floor joists are VERY large, much taller than any house I’ve lived in or remember looking at before - there is a LOT of room above the beam up to the underlayment of the floor above - this is what surprised me whan I first pulled back some of the ceiling tiles, the drop ceiling it at about 7 feet or more, and is suspended below the beam. The top of the beam pushes 8 feet, and up to the top of the floor joists - no idea, but it’s WAY up there.
–Randy
Edit: so, I guess technically I’ve now started, having ripped out a 2 foot long section of the o