I was hoping to put up blog posts a bit more frequently, but reality does get int the way from time to time.
My main interest in model railroading is modeling the movement of goods from place to place. My first whack at operational givens and druthers is:
I want to do everything a western late steam era (1945-50) Class I railroad would do. I want to switch passenger trains, classify freight, pull engines off the trains and replace with more appropriate power for the next division, run Big Boys with long strings of cars, run E7s pulling a dozen or so streamliners, figure out where and when the trains should meet, run a peddler up the main switching industry while avoiding the aforementioned trains and everything else that railroads do.
That will not work. Not in the spare bedroom. Maybe if I had a several thousand square foot barn with heating and AC... Something will have to give and this is the agonizing part.
Dealing with reality - at most I can fit 4 maybe 5 people into an operating session before we are all tripping over each other. More frequently, an operating session will just be myself. So I want something that I can run by myself, but can also be fun for a handful of people. Next, just running long trains with a Big Boy in front is not enough, there must be some mental stimulation, some puzzle to be solved to hold my interest.
An early concept that I played around with for quite some time was a small yard and nearby branchline. Most of the mainline was represented by a dual end hidden staging yard that enters and departs the modelled area on a helix at each end of the modelled area. The modelled area is a town on the mainline with a small yard, a short section of mountainous mainline, the branchline and the town the branch serves. Here is the trackplan I came up with. This trackplan doesn't meet some of the minimums I listed in my last blog post because I deleveloped this before checking out the appearance of various rolling stock on various curves.
Here is what I was working with, it is not quite up to the standards I mentioned in my previous post, but that could have been fixed without too much effort.
On the top is the mainline level, the bottom is the upper deck with the end of the branchline.
I then laid out the tracks in Auran's Trains 2006 to see how operations would go. Quite fun for while, some sessions were actually too busy, but then I started seeing patterns in how things went. There was too much similarity in each session. I was on to a general solution to the "puzzle", and my interest in it fell off. Back to the drawing board.
After much thought and several more trackplan attempts, I came up with what I thought would be a reasonable concept and a trackplan that would work out alright - the primary focus will be on the flat classification yard at Port. The "prototype" yard is a bit too small due to the constraints of geography and economics. Which makes it a pretty good choice for modelling. While I would really like to model some passenger facilities, leaving them out makes the rest of the yard work out real well.
The main level is all about Port, a helix up to the next level gets us some mainline running and a couple of small towns and industries. The upper level can be built as a much later phase. The basement level is lots of staging tracks with a reversing loop at each end. Operations are like chess, simple in concept but real tough in practice. Trains arrive from the north, south, and east, trains headed to or from the east usually need changes to motive power. Some trains arriving from the east need to be split into northbound and southbound components, while some trains arriving from the north and south need to be combined into eastbound trains. All the rest is classifying the locals.
This can be very busy, but the workload can be easily varied for the number of operators available by running different schedules. I'll leave you with the current trackplan.
