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Your plan seems a little all over the place. As Chris said, a simpler plan would allow you to do your mountains more justice. It might also help your feedback count if you just made a track plan, instead of showing everything at once. Good Luck.
To be perfectly honest, this is not the style of layout that you commonly see here, and with 26+ screen shots to digest, it's takes a lot of time for people to absorb it. I suspect most readers who saw this just skimmed through the figures and saw your open-ended "any feedback?" question and thought to themselves: I don't have time to study all of this, and the Northlandz-style concept is not that interesting to me, so I'll pass on providing feedback. I don't mean this in a negative way at all - you should definitely build what you want; it just takes time to cultivate an audience for a layout thread. It can be helpful to ask more specific, narrowly-focused questions that people can respond to in 5-10 minutes, rather than asking them to spend an hour or more studying. That said, I have been very fortunate to get some excellent feedback from this group and my pike is so much the better for it, so it can be worth the effort.To keep things going, here are some specific comments:* Do you really want to build such an ambitious plan? Specifically, do you have the time, stamina and money it will require? The answer is quite possibly yes, but this will take a long time to build and you should be confident going in that it will hold your interest.* There are lots of loops and hidden track in the mountain area, and the upper deck doesn't really let this section 'breathe' in a way it deserves. But that's just my opinion, and you may feel very differently about it. I also don't care for track at the very edge of the benchwork, because it looks unnatural and it is kind of begging for a disaster.* Build the pike in stages in such a way that you can run trains and gain some experience with the concept. I would suggest building the mining area first, and devise some temporary track in place of the helix that could let you run trains. Then lay a temporary shelf over it so you can get a sense of how this will look and feel when there is a real upper deck in place. Then move on to the rest of the lower deck, again with temporary connections between the mining area and the rest of it, in place of the helix.* Make sure you work out a detailed plan of execution for the upper deck. Building a multi-deck layout if this complexity requires some significant engineering, and you can easily find yourself with something that is almost unbuildable. Your first few figures suggest that you have thought this through, but 3-d is quite a bit different from 2-d. As an example, I've had to get pretty creative with some of the benchwork in the stacked staging are under my Techachapi Loop:Some of the beams that support my upper deck had to be formed as a hybrid of 1x3 and plywood pieces to avoid obstructing lower deck roadbed. Happily it is all working out, and trains now run reliably throughout this section:In the process of converting electrons to wood, expect to encounter many problems that will require clever solutions. Hopefully you find that prospect appealing!In any case, build it, and the audience will come.
I have seen you run through the permutations elsewhere. This is one of the most elaborately envisioned roundy round layouts I have ever seen. I understand your desire and your list of wants. But you will be seriously truncating any kind of mountainous terrain with the second deck above it. I wont say it isnt doable as your explanation and section by section approach has made it clear what goes where now(plus I am viewing it on an Iphone) so that is not an issue. But it is not the type of layout I would build so I have very little to say about the plan beyond two issues I see. One is that your liftouts are under the middle of the city. Unless you are planning on foam buildings those are going to be really heavy to lift across the area between them and an aisle. I could see having a system that would allow you to push them up and lock them at a height that would allow working from beneath them but what I am imagining would be pretty complicated. Secondly, there is no staging that I see. You mention collecting for a long while, so I assume(always dangerous eh?) you have quite a bit of rolling stock that you would like to see wandering the bridges and canyons of your empire. With what you have shown you will have to manually assemble each train on the layout when you want to see it.Your plan seems workable as you have described it and you have thought out the construction of the benchwork that makes me believe it can be constructed as shown. I am just not sure that the mountains under the city will be the effect you envision. Now switch the two and put the city on deck one and the mountains above it with room to soar and be well lit from above and then things get interesting iIMHo. On deck one the core of the city becomes flats (way less expensive)on the liftout structures and the liftouts become lightweight mountain tops(easier to manuver around)Just my 2 cents.
Dear overly-ambitious layout project person: (The others will get the joke, you will, too, in this thread.)A few things, one an impression, two practical observations, and one more technical:1) This is a lot of RR and scenery in a relatively small space. The overall result of the plan is a big clutter of trying to encompass too many themes. They're all good ideas and convey a vision, but what the viewer would see on entering the layout area is that it's a bunch to digest. Gary's mention of "Northlandz" is a good expression of his impression that you might be on the verge of "too much", and "spaghetti bowl" trackage.2) 30" aisles are probably going to be unsatisfying. You are nose-to-train wherever you go, and there is little opportunity to stand back and enjoy the scenes. Also, it means you're planning to be operating this by yourself.3) The removable access hatches are going to be a lot of hassle. Removable scenery bits tend to get damaged or cause damage. As much as we will it to be otherwise, trackwork is never perfect and derailments are going to happen everywhere, so you pretty much need easy access at all points for 0-5-0 operation.4) 3% grades are steep, especially when combined with small radii. You will find train lengths very constrained by this, and a certain amount of operation frustration.I think you have a nicely usable space. One compromise you might want to strike with your real estate manager is to move or otherwise mitigate that area in the lower left labeled "shelf", allowing the layout to spread out instead of heaping everything in a big island in the middle. That way you can do a dogbone next to the door and then narrow the big middle peninsula. Whether doing that would fix the steep grades/small radii issue might take a bit more creativity.
OK, lets try this another way...Using the August 2013 MRR (Page 45) magazine for reference, the HO Layout built by Jim Bonnett is based on Canadian Rockies that is 11x22 feet. It's lowest point is 42" (hidden below the Roundhouse); the Roundhouse itself is at 48". This is a Continuous Loop design using a "Figure-8" loop through a Mountain with the high point being at 57". Behind the Mountain is a Staging Area that is at 52". Maximum Grade in this design is 3% and there are 5 Tunnels / 10 Portals; mostly in the Mountain Zone.I have a strong interest in a N-Scale, 2-Deck Layout in which I want to incorporate this concept (not a direct copy) as one of the two decks.The major modifications I am looking at are: Drop the "Penticton Harbor" Place the Roundhouse on the other Deck that will be more of a City design built in the late 1800's that has maintain it old look and feel into the Modern era with a large Union Station to hold several passenger trains In the place of the Roundhouse place a Helix to transfer between Decks Convert this from a Single Main Line to a mainly parallel Dual Main line were 2 trains can operate in separate Continuous Loops and potentially allow the two Continuous Loops to operate as a double size Continuous Loops such that a single train would travel one-way on Loop #1 and the opposite direction on Loop #2 Use the Staging Yard and View Block to hold a Deep River Canyon such that Loop #1 would be at the bottom of the canyon along the river edge and Loop #2 be up near the canyon edge. I envision that both Main Lines would climb the mountain in that same "Figure-8" loop style (same as many old RR's did in Colorado during the Steam era) and rather than decline back down the outside edge, would continue the climb along the outer edge until both tracks reaches the helix to transfer to the other deckOK, what would be the technical issues I would need to watch out for in such a modification?Something like this given my ROW space
This discussion could go on forever between you and the forum members, so what I suggest is you go ahead with building the layout as these last plans are. You seem to be content with them and forum members seem content to blow holes in them -- all in good taste, of course. You obviously have the helix done, maybe some of the framework? My only suggestion is to pick a place to start laying track, and get to it. A billion words of discussion will not get one piece of layout done. if you can, post once in a while some pictures and description of your progress. Don't put off construction by spending days reading and writing posts which seem to be muddying the waters. Time to turn your dream into reality. The truth is that as you put down track and see how things are progressing you'll make alterations, deletions, and additions to the track plan as you go. Nobody can anticipate that beforehand. Just do it.
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Topic: Rocky Mountain Empire (N-Scale) - Design Stage #6 (Read 4719 times)
