Southern Pacific Switching Layout

[FCIN]

Ed, Here is my version of your Track-plan of the Palmetto Spur:

Nice plan Justin - simple, yet prototypical with plenty of operating potential. I would agree with Stein and Greg that you should probably move the main line turnout further up (northward?) so you could use that portion of the "main" to switch out a car or two if needed. If this represents a typical industrial spur where the switch crew is coming from a nearby yard to work the spur, then it would just look better and be a bit more functional then to use the main for car storage. Also work better if you want to operate it as a separate company that keeps the loco on the spur and picks up the inbound cars off the connecting line.

It would also give you another option for an industry that spots cars on the spur like this location in Liverpool, NY: http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=r5kx8m8...ORM=LMLTCC. Having room to work between the main and the spur would allow you to do something like that if you wanted to do so.

Regardless, get your staging section put up and temporarily pin down the track and operate it for a while to see if you are happy with it. Would only take you a couple of hours to put the track down, connect a set of feeder wires at the end of the staging section and away you go! Actually operating the proposed plan will allow you to see if you want to change any of the industries or modify the track layout in any way. That's more or less what I've been doing for the past few weeks. Operating the plan; changing things around some and just having fun.

By the way, that AnyRail program is pretty good - even just using the demo version, you can throw together nice ISL plans with a minimal learning curve.