faraway Wrote:I'm following this thread since some time and I admire your layout. It is a great industrial scenery.
May I ask one question, why do you have a moderate elevation in the lower left corner (in the layout drawings)? I assume you will be do heavy switching. You might fight rolling cars. What is the reason to do so?
It is a fair question. Mostly because I first built my layout totally flat, and then decided, since I wanted to rebuild the layout to make it a sectional layout anyways, to experiment with adding some inclines.
My original plan was to have the main scene along the top at elevation 0, have the tracks at the center of the left wall (and two staging tracks closest to the wall along the bottom wall) at elevation 0.5" (ie a 2% incline up around the upper left hand corner).
The track down from the middle of the left wall to the two track river barge terminal scene closest to the center of the room along the bottom part of the layout would be 2% (0.5") downhill from the middle of the left wall to the harbor scene, which again would be flat.
The mainline (middle of the five tracks along bottom wall) would rise a further 2% from 0.5" elevation to 1" elevation, to hit the left end of the bridge by the door at also at +1" elevation.
Staging tracks (two tracks closest to the wall along bottom side of layout) would be flat at elevation 0.5".
And then there would be a corresponding 1" rise (2% incline) along the right wall.
I have since reconsidered this, and am now mulling two other ways of doing this, both involving keeping the three tracks closest to the wall in the lower left hand corner at the same level, so I can use all those three tracks as a small yard scene, and free up the space I am currently designating as a support yard (closest to the center of the room along the top wall) to be an industry track:
a) To say that max elevation is 0.5" instead of 1.0" - so the only inclines will be 2% up going counterclockwise in the upper left hand corner, 2% down from the middle of the left wall to the river scene, and 2% up for about half (the lower half) of the main along the right wall.
This makes it possible to add a crossover from the main to the one of the staging tracks and turn the main and those staging tracks in the lower left hand corner/bottom wall into a small Industrial support yard that also functions as visible staging, and makes it possible to redevelop the area along the front of the top edge into an industry of some kind instead of yard tracks.
b) Or keep the max elevation at 1" (to give a nice step up, with a retaining wall) behind the barge terminal scene, but make the inclines twice as steep (4%) along the left side of the layout.
Visually it looks better with a steeper incline in the upper left hand corner and a bigger vertical separation from the barge scene up to the main/staging tracks, but I might be pushing things too hard operationally in the upper left hand corner - where cars will be pushed back up a 4% incline around a 22" radius curve when destined for the barge tracks or the staging/yard area in the lower left hand corner/along lower wall.
I am not good at visualizing elevations in my head, so I am just going to set the tracks up and do some test running a max length of cars ahead of the engine to see whether a 4% incline at 22" radius is too much in the upper left hand corner, and for the incline down from to the barge scene.
If so, I'll go down to 0.5" as max height for the plateau with the three tracks from the middle of the left wall and over to the bridge by the door, plus a less steep incline along the right wall as well (to end up at elevation 0.5" at the right end of the bridge, too.
Probably not real clear description - at is 7 am over here. Time to head in to work :-)
Grin,
Stein