Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[C855B]

Sleeping on last night's sketch refinements resulted in this clarity:



Thick blue lines are backgrounds. Gray line down the middle is the change in floor level previously mentioned.

[C855B]

Starting to put track down on the above benchwork plan. Doing East Yard first and my eyes are rolling back into my head. Anybody care to share thoughts or hints about compound ladders with Atlas #7's? Are the reverse curves objectionable?

[GaryHinshaw]

Before you even mentioned it a few posts ago, I was going to suggest a N-S peninsula orientation.   Before that though, I would encourage you to try and lay out the scenes you're especially interested in capturing as LDE's, then figure out how to string them together.   Laying out a bunch of linear peninsulas in a fairly rigid way like this seems too restrictive for a railfanning-style pike.

There are a lot of ways to lay out a compound ladder.  Here is a sample that has 1.25" track centers with Atlas #7s:



I don't think this has any scary reverse curves in it. 

Nice to see the planning start!
-Gary

[C855B]

Good. Thanks for the ladder suggestion. That was what I had started but it wasn't looking right. The goal is a handful of yard tracks capable of 15' trains, and #7's make for really long simple ladders.

Yeah, the rigid peninsulas bother me, too. The backbone at the top has to stay, however. There are 6x6 support posts at the top of the plan for the catwalk and observation deck (gray boxes on slightly revised plan, below). These also dictate where the peninsulas go, or at least start. That step/ramp at Pomona also needs to be in one place only and more or less perpendicular to a walk path, which means the center peninsula or an equivalent has to cover most of the level change.

LDEs are Pomona-Colton Tower, Victorville Cement (narrow gauge there), Yermo-Kelso, Wasatch-Green River, loco shops at Cheyenne, and Buttermilk-Gibbon. One immediate thought is shortening the Wasatch peninsula and making the Cheyenne-Gibbon portion into an elbow to the left. That would move Cheyenne to the center of the peninsula, which works better. I don't want to get too "curvy" with the benchwork if it can be avoided due to the carpentry complexity, and curved benchwork eats square footage.

Also, I'm not a fan of "donut holes" in trackplans that IMO are the bane of HO since they create so much unusable space and create duckunder scenarios. In the Greeley trackplan, they are using their "donut holes" as workspaces, with access afforded by stairs descending below floor levels. That's a bit much.

Oh... don't think that the track will be strictly parallel with the edge of the benchwork everywhere. That's a no-no. Wait until I get some mainlines down for you; even the long tangents will be at angles.

[MichaelWinicki]

Laying out a bunch of linear peninsulas in a fairly rigid way like this seems too restrictive for a railfanning-style pike.

Nice job Gary putting into words, what I was thinking.

[C855B]

"Clean-up on Aisle Three!" 

Yes, I agree, but I could use a hand getting out of the rut. The big space is a little overwhelming. The hard parameters dictated by building features were already mentioned. I can mitigate some of the symmetry by narrowing cross-sections when it will work. Yermo to Ogden is the best candidate for that since it's single track with sidings. I'll also look at reshaping, such as making Victorville Cement more of a peninsula and maybe curving Afton Canyon around it.

(The 4" step-up in the center of a perfect square makes avoiding symmetry challenging if I'm using the layout to cover it. The alternative is to blow a lot of building budget and time on a 14 cu. ft. concrete pour inside a building, and then there's the stuff that would need to be deconstructed in the prep. Just to bring the floors to the same level? IOW, the straight center peninsula is a cheat to avoid a bunch of work solving a safety issue.)

One other design limit - no duckunders, not even non-public duckunders for maintenance/derailments. Gary, if you'll recall from earlier this year I had a temporary medical issue in the way of progress. This was spine surgery. I've been back to 100% since July, but if this were to become an issue again any duckunders would potentially make the layout unoperable to me. It's crap getting old, but it beats the alternative.

[C855B]

Oh... one other thought. IMO the concept of "LDE" more or less goes away with a very large space. There are focus points, for sure, but to pick and choose a feature you want to emphasize and design around at the expense of other elements... well, there is little or no loss to other elements, they had plenty of elbow room to begin with. If there's a design feature here, it's "all mainline, all the time", and lots of it, with a couple of nods to smaller operating settings.

But I hear you on "railfanning-style". Avoid the linear-in-back-of-linear ho-hum. Make the train(s) go in and out of the scenes without in-your-face predictability. I'll work on that.

[MichaelWinicki]

Oh... one other thought. IMO the concept of "LDE" more or less goes away with a very large space. There are focus points, for sure, but to pick and choose a feature you want to emphasize and design around at the expense of other elements... well, there is little or no loss to other elements, they had plenty of elbow room to begin with. If there's a design feature here, it's "all mainline, all the time", and lots of it, with a couple of nods to smaller operating settings.

But I hear you on "railfanning-style". Avoid the linear-in-back-of-linear ho-hum. Make the train(s) go in and out of the scenes without in-your-face predictability. I'll work on that.

Mike, you may want to take a look at Jim Reising's plan again.  I luv the symmetry he's created.  It looks natural and not so rigid.

Yeah, the curves and such eat up floor space-- but you have a ton of floor space to work with.

Also since it is a railfan's pike, then maybe more open aisle-space would be a good thing– then one can step back and really take in a scene.

I agree with you on the duck-unders... Not a good thing to have. 

[C855B]

Thanks. I took another look at Jim's plan. It looks like the issue I have here is essentially the long uninterrupted arrow-straight benchwork, so it's not the symmetry alone, it's how it is "packaged". I'll work on that. It also made it sink in that keeping the 5' width (actually, two 30" sections sandwiched) the entire length of each peninsula is unnecessary, and plays into the rigidness issue.

But in my defense for these first drafts, AnyRail's object drawing tools truly suck. You can put track together like an SOB, but free-forming graphic objects like benchwork is tedious and error-inducing. And you need a sense of your benchwork, with constraints, before laying track. AR's issues are doing nothing for my 30-year professional bias/prejudice that European software designers wouldn't know a decent UI if it bit them on the butt. MacDraw from 25 years ago worked bunches better.

[tmi]

(This is compounded by "a personal problem" that when software angers me, I write something better. Entire applications. I seriously don't like to write code, but I'm good at it. However, this time I'm not going to let AnyRail, 3rdPlanIt, or the countless other dreadful MRR drafting programs pi$$ me off to the point where I become a code bum again. I want to build a railroad, not spend the next 10 years supporting an application to do it.)

(There. I feel better now.)

[/tmi]

[packers#1]

If Anyrail and the space are overwhelming, why not go back to grid paper and pencil first? I find it's way easier to get the ideas out, and then going back onto the trackplanning software to work out how reality dictates the grid and paper.

[GaryHinshaw]

When I started planning TBC (and its ill-fated Maryland predecessor) I had definite scenes in mind that I wanted to include, and I tried a bunch of ways to lay them out in the available space without regard to benchwork.  Why not break out some satellite imagery and start plunking down scenes to see how things might flesh out.  (I would recommend scaling them down by a factor of 2-3 to start with.)  At the very least, you'll quickly get a sense of how big (or small) this space really is.  When this starts making sense, you can semi-trace track routes from the image layer to the track layer.  Eventually, you will "discover" the plan that already exists. 

Use the Force. 

[C855B]

Heh. The Force. Robyn and I were chatting yesterday about where the long-gone IC freight house and team tracks were located, relative to where our building is. I showed her where the angled buildings next to us were placed around the old tracks, and what possibly were the foundations for the freight houses. Four tracks, I think. But then I said, "Let's go over to the history museum and see if they have any satellite photos from 1930 or 35." It took her a couple of seconds, tops. 

A big influence, to my failing, I guess, is a lot of what I'm after is arrow-straight in real life. Nebraska, and the desert. Also the bits in the L.A. basin were mostly long tangents. While I grew-up minutes from Tehachapi and Cajon, SP in Lancaster was near the middle of a 20-mile bit of absolutely tangent track. So my everyday, to and from school railfanning experience was seeing a headlight emerge around the hill at Ansel, 13 miles away... and then not being able to wait the 15 minutes it would take to get there because I'd then be late for class. That is straight!

Anyway, our afternoon task is back to the mundane of working on the building. Yesterday I tried to move the east wall of the restroom semi-intact to save a little construction and mess. I need another foot in there, mostly for a larger door. But they did something funny to secure the base, possibly Liquid Nails, and the Sawzall wasn't doing much other than binding and clogging teeth. So the wall comes down in pieces, and this afternoon is a truck run for sheetrock and the door. [sigh]

Interesting aside... as we remove and dispose of old insulation, the "characteristic aromas" abate with it. It's a 40-year-old building full of nose-wrinkling musty smells. In this case, the restroom smelled like an old gas station restroom (ew!), and when Robyn pulled the insulation out most of the smell went with it. I was thinking about not replacing some of the fiberglass in the exterior walls, but now I think better of that idea.

[GaryHinshaw]

Straight is fine if that's the prototype you're going for. It can be quite difficult to pull that off convincingly, but you certainly have as good a shot as anyone.  For fun, I tried thinking about the Victorville Cement scene (at least I think it's the one you have in mind).  First I took a map image of the area and plunked it down full size on your space:



Well, that's not going to work!  How about 3:1 compression?



or maybe flipped?



Now you can start to see how this might play out here: the balloon track is not too small to be plausible, the highway bridge at the bottom is a natural scene divider to the south, same for the curve around the park to the north.    You also get some ideas for how to route mainline track with a realistic flow.  Just some food for thought.

[C855B]

Yep, you got it. Actually... and you would appreciate this... my "V'ville Cement" is mostly going to be a transported Monolith! Victorville's operation is about 3X bigger than Monolith, and their quarry line is standard gauge, so following Monolith makes for a plausible compression. It's a great excuse for a simple narrow-gauge up'n'back. Monolith didn't have a loop track, but I could certainly add one.

One other feature of Victorville is a pair of through trusses over the Mojave River immediately north (RR east) of the plant: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Victorville,+CA&hl=en&ll=34.568466,-117.315504&spn=0.003693,0.006051&sll=37.6,-95.665&sspn=57.066178,99.140625&oq=victor&hnear=Victorville,+San+Bernardino,+California&t=h&z=18

I see what you mean about the overlay. Thanks. I will have to do that with Afton and Wasatch.

[GaryHinshaw]

Ah yes, the double truss scene is already included, where the red oval is in this version with photos:



This scene includes a nice bend in the river, and a plausible way to make the transition to Daggett/Yermo.  It's really starting to come together.