HO Scale Great Divide - Planning Stage

[Leggy]

Thanks to Rob Chant of jomrd.com here's the Great Divide Railway & Mining Co trackplan of the line from Mourilyan to Ravenshoe with room to expand to a second level.

20x30ft total.

The GD is freelanced based in North Queensland, Australia.
This is HO scale, train lengths are roughly 9ft (2x locos, 20x ore cars)
26" curves minimum and grades are planned to max at 2%. Empties uphill, loads down.


Operations are straight forward, the roster will consist of roughly 10x locomotives, 2x dedicated to switching, working the mine fuel/supply train and MoW with the other 8x pairing up to haul the ore trains. Ore trains arrive at the holding yard behind the ore dock and wait their turn to unload, the yard is used to store excess ore cars and allowing trains to swap locomotives before heading back to the mine.

I'm looking for another set of eyes to look over it, thoughts?

[Philip H]

Thats a well done plan - the software he's using gives a quality product.

Its got a lot of room to just run, always a plus, but the ops concept is a bit tough for me to grasp.  The Quarry to concentrator and quarry to dockside are easy enough to understand, but if the prototype sequence would be quarry to concentrator to dock side then the physical placement seems off on the plan. 

And I'm not sure you have enough on line yard  capacity to hold the number of trains you hint at.

Locomotives look cool though.

[Leggy]

Quarry only loads the ballast train. It's pretty direct Ravenshoe mine to port operation. The idea is there'd only ever actually be 2x ore trains running along the main at any one time.

The fuel/supply train run would collect the tank cars and boxcars from one end, take them to the other and swap them and run back. It'd run once a session.

The MoW train would be left in the quarry siding when not in use.

The most switching at the yard would be swapping locomotives from the ore trains and removing any ore cars needing servicing/repair.