Wiredup Wrote:steinjr Wrote:Pretty similar to your first plan.
You claimed that your main goal was to watch trains run through mountain scenery. Is your true main goal really to build a layout that basically just is one big yard ?
This layout shows no track of attempts to build sincere/believable railroad scenes (ie scenes where the track pass just once through each scene). What you have here seems to be a basic toy train type layout - where the point is to cram in as much track as possible, and where the layout is intended to be watched from above.
If those are your true design goals, then it's fine. If your goal is still to watch trains pass through realistic looking mountain scenes, you need to make your layout higher and concentrate on "less is more".
My advice, your choice.
well it's not done yet I still got the whole left and lower side of the room to work with, which is where I'd put the scenes you speak of. I guess I should complete the plan first.
I do wanna watch trains go through mountain scenes, but I still wanna play in the yard. I got enough room to do both...as you showed.
I just don't wanna outright and copy thats all.
It is your layout, and your plan should of course reflect your priorities. I am not expecting you to copy the track plan I suggested. But what I am hoping that you will do is to think about (and explain) why you add some features, and not others.
One of the things I am pointing out is that when you redrew and presented your plan for comments, the thing that seems
most important for you to fit in, since it is the first (and only) thing you draw is a
http://big yard and engine terminal.
MR author David Popp, who has an N scale layout where he does operationg sessions with a crew of several other people at times, has a layout that looks pretty much like this when I draw something based on it in a 2 x 14 foot space in H0 scale :
In N scale, a yard area that is 14 feet long in H0 scale would be about 7 feet 8 inches. That is from the far left end (yard ladder) to the far right. Body tracks is contained within an 8 foot long box in H0 scale (about 4 feet 6 inches in N scale).
The shortest of the three yard classification tracks in the Popp-inspired plan here are long enough for eight cars. The primary A/D track is long enough for an arriving train of eight cars, an engine and a caboose.
In contrast, you have 9 body tracks or AD tracks, plus a ladder bypass/caboose track in your the yard and four tracks, a turntable and a five-track roundhouse for the engine terminal.
That is a
http://big yard for a room your size. How are you planning to
use that big yard ? The rest of your layout is not big enough to generate a huge amount of traffic for a yard that size.
Also, you have seemingly not considered (or at least not said anything about) staging, ie where trains will come from and go to.
Which makes me wonder whether you perhaps may be planning a big (for your room) yard because you think of a yard more as a big "parking lot" where hundreds of cars will be "stored" more than as a sorting machine for cars which come from somewhere and shortly will go on to somewhere else ?
If you want to "play in the yard", sorting cars can be done in just a couple of tracks. Adding more tracks than you need to make up your trains doesn't really add more variety or more challenges - it just adds more of the same.
Also, scenically, judged from the track plan exclusively (no scenery included in drawing), I don't get a feel of "yard in mountain area".
The look of your yard area does not say local yard in a town along the track, where a through train will drop off a cut of cars to be distributed to local industries by a local switcher, or picks up a cut of cars to take onwards to the east or to the west.
It doesn't not say "helper base", where engines to help push heavy trains up across the mountains are added to a train and engines are serviced, or "engine terminal/crew change point", where train stop to swap engines before going on.
The impression I am left with from the combination of a largish classification yard and a large engine terminal is more "big city
at the end of the line, where trains (both freight and passenger trains) originate and terminate".
As I started by saying - it is your layout, and you are the only one it has to fit. So if you want it this way, then of course the way it will be.
I am just trying to force you to consider (
and spell out clearly) what your goals really are.
Because the first step in building your dream layout lies in figuring out what your dreams really are. Once you know clearly where you want to end up, it becomes a lot more easier to figure out in what direction you want to head, and to figure out whether you are getting closer to your goal or further away from your goal as you go.
Smile,
Stein