L&N Industrial Rail Spur

[FCIN]

I'm still around and check out Big Blue once or twice or day, but tend to just stay on the side lines lately.; so I was more than a little surprised to see comments posted on what I thought was a long dead thread (hey! that rhymes). At most I figured it had outlived its usefulness a long time ago.

Not much to report other then to admit that I'm still playing around with slight variations to my basic plan and the industries on it. I may be the only person on Big Blue that comes up with a slightly different layout plan every couple of months; makes structure mockups; and operates it off and on for a while; while never really doing any real construction. I have to say that I actually enjoy making these changes and being able to operate the revised plan to see how well it does/doesn't work - while still looking for a plan that I find really interesting/unusual and one that I'll try to get to a finished state.

Now that it appears we're going straight from summer into winter like we did last year, it's time to put away the camera, say goodbye to the yard work and get more involved with the model railroading. In spite of spending much of my time out photographing trains and other things, I do operate the layout once or twice a week, and really enjoy being to spend a nice hour or so switching; but just haven't got involved enough to really start building.

With all that said; here is the current track plan (18in X 20ft HO Scale):     Industries on this plan are:
1) Frozen Foods Distributor: Inbound Refrigerator Cars of meat/produce/frozen foods - 2 car spots
2) Distribution Warehouse: Inbound Box Cars of various commodities - 5 car spots
3) Cooking Oils Distributor: Inbound General Service Tank Cars of assorted cooking oils
4) Car Storage and/or Team Track - 2 or 3 car spots
5) Another Warehouse Structure (undetermined business at this time): Inbound Box Cars - 3 car spots
6) Bakery: Inbound Airsilde Hoppers of flour - 2 car spots ***this can alternately be a small candy manufacturer that receives both Airslide hoppers and Corn Syrup tank cars although the C/S tanks I have are just a bit too modern for my era and have currently been mothballed.

I've been testing this plan out for about 2 months and seems to be fine for the most part. The main thing that I like about this plan is it allows for plenty of box car spots; something that has been missing from previous versions, while still allowing for most of my other equipment types. Since my modeling era is the late 70s to early 80s - plenty of box car traffic was still in use and also the colorful short line IPD box cars were plentiful. Also none of that horrid spray paint graffiti and cars that look that they are headed for the scrapper.

An operating session where I place/pull one or two cars from each industry is taking over an hour without any time killing; so not every industry gets worked every session and I end up with a session taking right at one hour, which is about right for me.

But, as previously mentioned, I still seem to be looking for another track/industry arrangement that keeps eluding me for some reason. I've also been having second thoughts about the number of industries and car spots and wonder at times if I'm over doing it a bit. I've found that just placing/pulling 2 to 4 cars a session still takes around an hour, so perhaps I need to scale things back a bit. Perhaps slightly smaller structures with fewer car spots and the industries spaced out a bit more? Just undecided right now, so more operating sessions are in order.

So that's where things stand with me for now. Maybe one of these days, I'll start a new thread when I actually settle on a "final" plan and really do some work on it. Then again, maybe having the ability to change things around now and then is the way to go for me?