One with lots of trackwork, a fairly extensive engine maintenance facility and a reworked station area on the left side.
Pro: lots of places with action.
Con: need to buy another 10 switches.
Or less track, with the double track on the left side and one industry (only serviceable by driving a train directly from the traverser) removed, again the simplified maintenance area, a possible place for a small station on the right hand module (where the engine plus four green car train is parked) and generally more room for scenery. Pro: less pointwork for easier operation and longer trains possible. Con: uh, less track?
I don't know that less track is necessarily a con. if you have so much track that there is not room for scenery or structures then you have track for the sake of track. It may be fun to move trains around or do switching, but unless you are modeling a yard operation, what is the point? I like the second plan.
Less track means operating sooner, and, if you like, time to spend upgrading/detailing/weathering track to a higher degree.
Plus, I like the yard arrangement in the East side better on the second plan.
Eliminating the passing track out of the sector staging creates a bottleneck (good, IMO) but you may want to consider adding it in if leaving a passenger train at the station while a goods train passes by is an operating aspect you desire.
Galen
I may not be a rivet counter, but I sure do like rivets!
Righty, the latest plan has been decided on as being really cool and thus the first track is in its place! (so October 18th is the birthday of my layout, the first train ran today)
The layout will allow for much longer trains than originally (even way too long for the traverser, but it is better to have shorter trains and longer tracks than the other way round. These pictures are already old - as I'm writing this, the cork roadbed has been put into place.
The point motors are hideously in sight, but I hope that careful ballasting will render them invisible.
A little underpass - a small stone railbridge will run over this.
Next a few decisions about how to tackle the challenge of wiring it properly...
More terrain-building and painting of backdrop and ground - what else to do on newyear's eve.. After adding some cliffs and painting them my girlfriend commented that they were too American looking, so they'll have to be converted into something more German.
Assembled some thirteen-in-a-dozen building kits too. (Factory buildings by Faller)
Well, the progress pictures had to wait longer than expected, probably due to a bout of laziness posting anything.
At last I got the rest of the track here and within a few days the track was laid and the wiring for the rest of the track was done, so now one engine can run back and forth on the layout. Earlier I painted the backdrop and the ground and added some ground forms using styrofoam and paper mache. If you look closely, you may find some North Sea sand between sleepers here and there. Unfortunately I am pretty much out of that, so the rest will be ballasted using WS products. (note to self: need to collect sand whenever the opportunity arises..) I'm not sure whether I'll weather the track now, it seems to look pretty nice the way it is right now.
That looks good. It reminds me when we lived in Nackenheim south of Mainz at the river Rhine. There is a lot of this red sandstone. You can see lots of old building made of that stone.
Here is a link to the Palace in Mainz made of that kind of stone : http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/3774401.jpg
You can do some vineyards. That would fit perfect with the red stone and ground.
Just a remark fro my wife. In the area of Mainz a common ending of town names is "heim". That would make "Irgendheim" a more typical town name in that German area.
So then it will be Irgendheim, or preferably at some point something more specific than Irgend-. Thank you for the tip. A quick look at the map indeed gave a ton of -heim type placenames.
With the red stone prevalent in the area I'm now stuck with the question of how to paint the rock faces near the tunnel. I gave them a coat of grey, which doesn't look too good at this point, but it might have to be changed into something more sandstoney. Around here where I live most of the rocks are granite, so that is the inspiration I have nearby, but that would be exactly what I'm not after. The ballast is also middle brown, so that would be the palette I'll be using.
And vineyards would be an eyecatcher, only have to find a nice place where they would fit. The layout isn't that hilly like a typical Middle-German Rhine valley-type layout.
Slowly it starts looking like a layout. Most of the track has been ballasted, some minor touching up is still needed here and there, but the sand is stuck well enough that I dare to run the trains now. The track could probably be cleaned a bit better, but most of the time most trains run without pushing them...
Around the 'parade'-section I started experimenting with ground cover, not entirely sure how good it looks, maybe the colours are a bit too bright. Eventually tree cover will follow.
To get the rest of the layout electrically functioning I continued working on the traverser fiddle yard. Might end up wiring every track individually to allow flexible storage and switching there. Having the control panel on the other side of the layout doesn't help (distance is about 2 metres).
"but it is no flex track under tension so as long as it is more or less fixed it won't be a big problem, right?" If anything goes wrong, I can't say I wasn't warned now...
"but it is no flex track under tension so as long as it is more or less fixed it won't be a big problem, right?" If anything goes wrong, I can't say I wasn't warned now...
Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't meaning to offend or be derogatory. I just wondered how you got flex trak to stick with such a small amount but now you clarified it's not flex trak I understand..
It's irrelevant how it looks at the moment as ballast covers a multitude
