Ideas for a future college layout

[Justinmiller171]

Justin, what ever design you come up with, I don't think you can use a large locomotive to switch it. In 6 feet you are going to need to limit yourself to something small and use shorter rail cars. If you use an Sd40-2t and 3 80 foot boxcars as an example, you will probably not be able to do more than just run them back and forth on a straight track, and then you will probably only be able to move a foot or two. I just measured one of my 64 foot Trinity reefers and it looks to be 10 inches long over the couplers. 85 foot passenger cars are 12 inches long. I don't have a tunnel motor since the Santa Fe didn't have them, but I suspect they are 12 inches long. A tunnel motor and three Trinity reefers would take up somewhere around 3 1/2 feet of space on the layout. You can't even clear a switch if you are taking up that much space on a 6 foot layout!

IF I build a timesaver I would use a short switching engine, Maybe a f-unit or a small steam engine, I was just using a large engine in Xtrkcad for testing.

I'm not going to decide on anything soon, I will start doing some actual track-planning in a few months.