I've been messing around with trying to sketch out a new shelf layout design.
I had a previous layout that was 2x7', built on two pieces of foam sandwiched together.
This worked out reasonably well, but a solid foam base means you can't really finish up the edges of it, and its size was actually just a tad too long to fit in the bed of my dad's pickup truck, so moving it around was a bit awkward even though it was really light. And you couldn't just cut it into two sections, as the track plan didn't really provide any straight lines where there were no switches, and you wouldn't be able to fasten the two halfs back together again.
The track plan was based on a MR article from 1986 entitled "Railroading for City Lovers". Here's a photo of what it ended up looking like, it never really got completely done:
It crammed a fair bit of track into a small space but had a basic weakness in that really short switching tails basically meant you couldn't really move more than one car at a time out of the yard tracks, and could only bring two cars up to the runaround. The design, based on a junction with single track branch meeting a double track main in a tight urban space was attractive, but switching was little solving one of those little sliding puzzles where you have to move the empty spot around.
Anyway, after a move into an apartment with zero extra space for a few years, and then I got a job back in the city I grew up in, although I didn't know how permanent it would be so for the last few months I've actually been staying at my parent's place again. Never really saw that one coming...
So anyway, I recently started thinking about designing and building a new layout for when I get moved out on my own again.
Major design points are:
-scale: HO. Yes, you could get more in and be less cramped in N scale, but HO is my preferred scale and I have a lot of existing equipment and I'm not interested in starting fresh in a smaller scale
-portability: a layout composed of a few smaller sections that can be easily moved or transported. I've moved around a fair bit over the last 10 years and the future is still unclear
-operation: shelf layout means no continuous running option. I would want to be able to run things in a realistic, logical fashion. That means I want to include two things:
1) an interchange track that connects all the on layout industries to the rest of the world. Basically all the layout traffic would go through the interchange.
2) a spur designated as the engine track. Just a simple engine parking track like this:
One thing that I'd like to do is re-use this factory built from DPM modular parts from the old layout.
I did some sketching and drawing over the last couple days, having a hard time coming up with an arrangement I even liked, much less tried to actually fit into a given space. Today I came up with this, which is the first design that I kind of like. I wanted the interchange track to be as long as possible, and still be able to be switched from one end, and the switching tails and runaround should ideally be able to handle about 3 cars. This design is intended as 3 equally sized 1.5x3' sections bolting together into a 9' long unit.
Please give me your opinion, what do you think will work/not work, should be improved, etc? I'm not sure about the "Industry A" in the top middle. That was kind of put in as an afterthought to fill in the empty space in the back. It would require some interesting scratchbuilt track arrangement to work. Which could turn out to be either a bonus or a pain.
