09-29-2009, 08:50 PM
Wiredup Wrote:the yard is actually made up of 3/6 combo....
3 tracks (the southern most tracks) are for passenger trains... two terminal tracks and a coach storage track.
the other 6 tracks are for switching/building freight.
I have no idea how to build scenery in winrail otherwise I would do so.but it is something I would like to.
I was thinking something along the lines of Jasper AB for the inspiration for my layout... it's got a large yard, a Y, and a roundhouse (or did at sometime according to googlemaps satellite view)
Oh sure - compared with a model railroad layout, even a yard in a smallish town (Jasper seems to have a population of about 4000 these days) will look pretty huge. Even smaller yards often have half a dozen or a dozen tracks a mile long.
On the map it looks like Jasper, AB, is between Banff, AB and Prince George, BC. Map/satelite picture link: http://tinyurl.com/yjxkglj
But is Jasper the endpoint on the line, where you have a large single ended yard fed by a turning wye for whole trains ? If you look at the yard again, it is oriented more or less like the one I drew - mainline seems to pass through the yard, with double ended sidings branching off on both sides of the main. It seems to be a town along the way, not a town where trains originate and terminate.
The wye you have at the southern/western end of the yard in the satelite pictures seems to be a fairly short turning wye - probably more for turning helper engines than for turning entire passenger or freight trains.
Is the railroad into or out of Jasper pretzel shaped, looping up and around itself ? Nope - it seems to pretty much follow Canadian route 16 east/west, along the north bank of the river.
By all means - if you want to have a big terminal and call it Jasper, AB, then do that. But what you have in your plan does not come across as a town along the way with a handful of long double ended sidings where trains can meet and an engine change location/helper base, it comes across as a stub ended terminal classification yard, a coach yard and an engine terminal at the end of the track.
(Edit) Btw - there is a pretty cool John Armstrong designed layout plan based on running trains along the Athabaska river in Model Railroad Planning 1998, pages 32-38.
(Edit2) - read up some more on Jasper. These days there are tourist trains that run from Vancouver to Jasper, Banff or Calgary, after which the engine is run around the train and the train heads back, with an overnight stay in Kamloops or Prince George.
You could model something like that, I suppose, transplanted back to the transition era, turning a passenger train using a simple double ended siding at Jasper (and a turntable for the engine), and then maybe backing the passenger cars into a an available single ended track for an "overnight stay for the passengers", while you run a freight train on your main line.
Smile,
Stein