Advice on what to do here?

So i scrapped the re-design idea in favor of just tweaking some things that I've already got.

Here's the current state of things below.

Problems to be fixed:

--Upper switching area. What in the world to do with it. I've laid out what I *THINK* is the possible solution here, but am still not sure. I've got two tracks running to the coal mine facility, the far right one is going to be an abandoned track overgrown, and may or may not even have a switch assigned to it. The far left track you see is simply an area to keep extra cars. The bottom of the picture is to service a small industry (Mine supplies w/ box cars, etc) and then the track to pull off the main with the switcher to be pushed into the coal filling area.

-- top entrance of yard does something funky with that one switch and another area, don't really know what I was thinking that night, or if i just wanted to run a train THAT badly. This will be resolved quickly.

-- Take out yard in favor of nothing more than passing track and extra industry? I'm planning to eventually add a 1x8 leading down from the top left corner to another 4x4 board that I've already got framed (just no room) to add myself an other area and then do some conversions to have some form of basic point to point with a wicked reverse figure eight at this end.

I'm going to upload these pics and hopefully i'll get some ideas

 

Very nice small layout. What is the size as pictured?

 

as pictured its 2.5 x 6, smallest radius gets down around 10 inches, does anybody know of any type of track radius gauge i could run around the track to find out what it actually is?

 

Correction:

2.5 x 5... my appologies. The other sections I own currently are 2 2x4s. I've thought about adding a small board to one and having it be 2.5x4 so that I could use that one alone for a single point of the point to loop track, but I'm frankly just not sure yet.

-Rob

 

Build your own with a pair of cheap plastic rulers or something. I know I've seen a picture of one somewhere, but googling it didn't turn up what I wanted. I did find this http://www.handymath.com/cgi-bin/rad2.cgi?submit=Entry

Seems simple enough to build a gauge and then just plug in the values for height and width.

 

That looks really simple... i might have to make one with a set of trucks and then put something on them, let an engine pull them around the track and then it'll come back with the sharpest radius memorized by a stick...

That sounds like it makes no sense, but it does, really!