Rainbows in the Lehigh Valley Gorge

[TMo]

So, I had this weirdly shaped room and a vision of what I'd like to model.  It was going to be mainline action in a very remote and scenic wilderness.  I'd include the town of White Haven, PA and a little bit of Hazleton, PA.  I'd also include the Mud Run curve, Rockport tunnel, the railroad bridge over the Lehigh just south of White Haven, and Penn Haven Junction.  But I really didn't know that for sure - I got pictures of these areas and looked for design opportunities to add each.

I made a lot of wild plans that included helixes, peninsulas jutting into the room, etc. before settling on a plan that works for this room:  (this was on two pieces of graph paper)

   
   

There's some overlap on the drawing, sorry about that, maybe I'll try to cut it down.  Someday I'll also make a better color representation. 

This diagram is oriented the same way as my "floor plan" presented in my previous message.  There's a doorway into the room, a duckunder to the middle of the room, and then in the lower left corner, another duckunder to get to my library.  I've only had a few "run-ins" with the duckunders, but they are memorable.

Anyway, this is just a very basic "twice around" loop on two levels.  The exterior loop runs down to the storage level and joins the second interior loop at two switches (one at Penn Haven Junction near a bridge over the Lehigh, one inside Rockport tunnel) which force the trains to the upper level.  As the exterior loop runs down, the interior loop is running up to allow for headroom for the trains running on the storage level.  The highpoint of the layout is just before a bridge over the Lehigh River just south of the town of White Haven.  At some point very soon I'll share a video I took of a train running all the way around the layout.

The storage level has 4 parallel tracks at it's widest point - three sets of ladder switches that allow for trains to run around the ladders.  Unfortunately, I've found that the outer two segments of the ladder are the only ones long enough to house my TOFC and coal drag trains, so they really clog things up down there - I should have provided for longer ladders, but too late now.

The whole idea was to allow me to run trains all day while I work in my office.  If I got bored, I'd switch out a train and run another.  One of my other interests was actually trying to do some scenery to model the lonely old gorge.

I could have modeled double track operations through the gorge since it was still double-tracked in 1976.  Today it's a single track, and that's what I decided to go with to allow for more room to model scenery.