Layout Review and Advice Sought

I'm kind of hesitant to post this because for the most part I've pretty much decided that this is the layout I want to go with. In fact, the laying of roadbed and WS foam risers and incline sets is well underway. With that said however, I wanted to get input from you guys on what improvements I might be able to make while in the early stages.

A few facts:

1) The layout dimensions are 8' x 17'.
2) This is N scale.
3) My main interest is running long trains up and down and through and under and around...I don't care much for switching operations at this point.
4) The yard will be used for staging.
5) The picture below is printed out from Atlas' Right Track software...and I just took a digital picture of the printout. Sorry if it's hard to see everything.
6) I'll be running BNSF trains....7-8 feet long.

I think that about covers the bare essentials. Unfortunately, I never figured out how to draw in structures and elevations and the like in the software I was using, so unless you have a good imagination you can't see them in the picture below. They're all in my head. But, just so you can get a bit of an idea about what I've got in mind, imagine that the left side of the picture is south direction. As you leave the yard headed south you begin into a 2% incline that continues to rise. Just before crossing over the north end yard lead and mainline (at zero elevation), it reaches a height of 2-1/2" and holds that elevation until it has cleared going UNDER the highline horseshoe. At this point it begins rising again and will eventually reach 6" in height as it wraps around the layout. The grade will begin to drop as it goes into the horseshoe curve and then goes back under itself....and will eventually get back down to ground zero to meet up with the north yard lead.

Now that I've got all that unnecessary jibberish out of the way...here's the picture.

Overall Track Plan


Yard


[ 31. March 2003, 13:58: Message edited by: Hoss ]

 

Hoss,

It looks to me as this this track plan meets the "givens and druthers," as John Armstrong would say, that you've layed out for us. You'll be able to watch your trains run 'round and 'round, and that can be a lot of fun, too.

You might want to consider leaving room in a few places to add industries in the future. You may find that you become tired of just watching your trains do the everlasting loop and want to do more with your layout. You don't need to tear out all your track to make an industrial park, maybe just scatter a few industries here and there.

You didn't mention what type of control system you intend to use. DC or DCC? It may not make a lot of difference in the long run, but now is definately the time to plan.

Pat

 

Hoss,
I would agree with Pat. I had designed my layout to allow primarily railfanning, and after a year now, I find it's getting a little boring. I'm tweaking the latout and adding some industries, some spots I can actually "operate" if I feel like it.

You do have a very good staging area, that will help give you variety with minimum input.

 

Thanks for the input guys. That's what I'm looking for. Your comments will be taken into consideration as I continue on with the construction of my layout.

Regarding the control system, I have already purchased and will be using the Lenz Set 100. I figure I can easily run two trains on the mainline at any given time....if not three. Then there's the yard...which in my opinion can provide plenty of action on it's on if one is so inclined.

Who's next??

 

I KNOW my layout isn't perfect. Doesn't ANYONE have any additional comments about it??

 

My biggest thought with this layout:

As you are running modern stuff, do you need to have a turntable there. Seems to me that these are not overly common these days, as in most cases you can turn a loco on a nearby wye or loop if needed (as you have just off to the right anyhow...)
Without the turntable I would re-jig the loco facility a bit to give you a bit more space to store loco consists. If you're anything like me (and most folk I know!) you will have far more loco's that you can reasonably use!

I agree with the rest, it seems to meet your criteria but it's always a good idea to give yourself enough space to change your mind without having to start from scratch!

I'm curious, you say you know it's not perfect, what are the problems you are seeing with it?

 

Thanks for your input.

You know...I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to use a turntable on the layout. I've never seen one in use. Maybe I'll do some looking tonight and see what I can do without the turntable.

I'll keep that in mind. Thanks.

Well...I don't really SEE anything that stands out to me as being WRONG. Which is part of why I wanted you guys to look at it. I'm new at this so I'm certainly no master at layout design. I just kind of felt like there HAD to be something wrong...and I've seen lots of other good comments on other layouts presented here so I thought I'd take my shot at it too.

I guess I did have some question about the yard. I've tried to apply a lot of what I've read here and in other places when designing the yard...but I just feel like I'm missing something.

 

Dare I comment on the layout at all? I myself only have a 4' x 8' HO layout, so my suggestions only come from what I would imagine might be issues if I were to build the layout you've drawn up.

Also I'm not sure if you're a big fan of scenery or not, which does make a difference in terms of whether or not my advice applies to the kind of layout you'd like to have.

The yard- I like it. I have been looking at a yard in my city lately, and your yard reminds me of it very much (except the turntable of course). It looks realistic, useful, and it'd give you lots to do. Also I like that it's straight. Curved yards aren't my favorite.

As far as the rest of it, I do like the path of travel, but if I were making it, I would consolidate the tracks, making them run closer together so you have more room for scenery. It looks like they're far enough apart for a small industry or building in places, but then whatever building is there will be sandwiched between tracks, looking cramped.

I was looking at the trackplan seeing where a road (for cars & trucks) might cross or parallel the tracks, but there's so many tracks everywhere that I don't think there's room for one. It looks like a grade crossing would have to cross at least 4 tracks.

But like I said, I'm a scenery fan, and I'd probably have 1/3 the tracks you've got in the same space.

All of that aside, I really like the way you've got it set up, as far as a long mainline run. It'd be great to see the train working it's way around the layout, 3 times on different routes. And 2 of those times the train turns back via the turns at the bottom right of your plans, and 1 time around it runs in a loop all the way around the table. That'd be great to get the train going, kick back, and watch it roll. Heck I've got the smallest layout I've seen, and it's even fun to watch the train go round n' round for quite awhile.

Anyway, good layout, I'll stop blabbering now. Also thanks for giving us a nice looking image of your trackplan that we can see. Some plans are hard to follow if they're too small.

 

Hoss, how about laying out the yard fullsize, as this is the lowest (and presumably first to get built), is it worth just building it and experimenting, certainly the yard bit looks okay to me, and provided you have left some space (which you have) you can experiment with the loco facility layout till you find something that you are happy with. It's sometimes easier to see how things look on the real thing that with a trackplan.

One thought that Dave's post put into my head, about the scenery, is it all going to be rural/mountains, or are you planning a town or city at any location? That might affect where you leave any spaces between tracks, or spaces that you can keep in mind to convert for industry use if you ever want to.

 

As far as scenery goes, I intend for most of it to be mountain/rural type scenery. I'm thinking I may have a few small towns along the way for the trains to pass through...but probably not any big cities. I'm considering fitting a town in somewhere that has a grain elevator off of the main line that is serviced by rail....but I have to see where I can fit it in.

I am in the process of redesigning the yard wihtout the turntable. I am not happy with the new design at this point, but when I have come up with something that I like I'll post a picture of it here for y'all to take a look at.

Regarding the comments about fitting roads in...I have managed to find a few places to have roads/streets. What isn't really evident from the track plan shown above is that the three tracks around the loop are at three different levels. Where they cross each other will either be by means of a bridge or over a tunnel. So, if I have a road following alongside of one of the tracks, it won't really have any grade crossings with other tracks.

 

I would suggest that you take your track plan and try planning in the scenery. I've seen lots of good track plans that can't be sceniced. One way to test if your scenery is going to work is to draw a few section view from a few places that look tight. Be honest and look at the slope of the embankments and if there are room for ditches. Some people just fix close vertical clearences with a retaining wall that is 50' high (scale feet) and 600' long (scale feet). Those same people will most likly say that even though they don't like that and it lacks realism, that was the only way to get the track plan to work. But in most cases if the plan was created with scenery in mind, a little up front tweeking could have avoided the trouble from the start. I know that in urban areas there are such retaining walls but sence you said you were modeling rual areas they would not be that common.

the reason I say the above statement is because you do have a lot of tracks crossing over and under in a close space and I was just wondering how you are planning the scenery.

Just a word of warning, don't plan difficult scenery situations, you might find that you will never scenic that area because you can't really figure out what to do there.

 

Very good points. Thank you. I CAN tell you that although I haven't acutally "drawn out" where the scenery will go, I definitely kept it in mind while I was developing the track plan (I'm very good at visualizing exactly how I want it to look). I can also tell you that in real life the tracks are not nearly as close together as they look on the track plan above. Some of that is because I tweaked it a bit when transferring it to my layout and some of it is just because of the scale.

There is only one location that I have found where the tracks are close enough that a retaining wall might be required...and I have already decided that instead of going with a retaining wall I will go with a cliff to make it look like I had to cut into the side of the hill to lay the tracks. I'm not a big fan of retaining walls in the kind of setting that I intend to create.

Most of the crossing over and under occurs in the lower right part of the layout. This looks complicated on paper, but the way I have it planned out in my head will not be too difficult to achieve. It will be combination of tunnels and possibly a bridge.

[ 03. April 2003, 16:18: Message edited by: Hoss ]

 

I have a question for you: from the drawing it's hard to judge distances. How far is the bottom right hand corner track from the aisle? That part appears to have one of the shorter radii, and Murphy's law (N scale version) states the probability of a derailment on a track section is directly correlated with the distance from the aisle. You know where i'm going...

 

My apologies on the picture being kind of hard to judge distances. The grid lines in the picture are one foot apart, if you can make them out.

To answer your question...that portion of the benchwork is 3 feet wide...and that particular track is about 4 inches off of the back edge.

What you said is true though. The fortunate thing is that if you are looking at the picture only the top part and the left part of the benchwork are against a wall. The right side and all of the bottom side is open to the rest of my garage. So, if a derailment does occur at that location it's just a hop, skip and a duck to get to it in a hurry.

 

I used a trick on my layout that I got from Allen McClelland. If your have copies of MRC from the late '70s Allen McClelland and a series of articles about his layout, the V&O. If you go to the one that covered scenery on the V&O he showed how he used a cliff of rock to hide the close verticle clearences between two tracks at different elevations. He did it by sloping the cliff outward, not back. You can't tell the cliff slopes outward because he would step the cliff back in a few places as he went up the cliff. It gives an optical allusion that the cliff is sloping back. This gives you more "land" on the top of your cliff and will give you some more space between the upper tracks and the edge of the cliff. Just a neat idea that works.

 

Interesting idea. I may have to give that a shot in the area where my tracks are the closest.

 

Hello Hoss.

You might want to rethink the idea of eliminating the turntable. I work for the Susquehanna Railway and we have one of the few remaining operational turntables in the New York New Jersey area that see's daily use. CSX is constantly bringing engines from their North Bergen yard and even from South Kearny for use to turn on our turntable! Its a neat sight to see a CSXT AC6000 on a turntable that spun our Decapods back in the forties!

 

Continuous running is definitely an option....but when I say that I don't mean I'm gonna set a train out on the main and just let it run for hours. I'll be building new trains in the yard and sending out other trains and new trains will be coming into the yard for breaking down and making different trains.

I currently do not have any industy on the layout, but I'm looking at some different possibilities. Perhaps a grain elevator or some other industries.

 

Thanks for the insight. I'll keep it in mind as I try to figure this whole thing out...