09-20-2009, 08:50 PM
Wiredup Wrote:Transition era in the rocky mountains. Canadian National and Canadian Pacific are the two roads featured here. Passenger traffic is a big focus point for me. I love watching passenger trains wind their way through the scenery... but I also wanna do some switch work.
So my goal is just to have a layout can have at least one train, two perfered of course) doing their buissiness along the rails, while I can do some switching at the yard or an industry. I also wanna have a town... but I'm starting to accept more and more that I won't get it all in.
Okay - watching a passenger train winding it's way through the mountains is one main goal.
What is your desired viewing perspective - helicopter pilot view or trackside railfan view ? The helicopter pilot view (seeing the train from above for miles and miles) is hard to carry off in a sensible way on a small layout. The trackside railfan view, watching the train pass in front of you through a scene, before you turn around (and move your viewpoint to another scene) is fairly easy to create, even in a small room.
Trick to making it believable is to have benchwork fairly high and having the tracks pass once through each scene. In a regular sized bedroom, you have room for 3-5 (max) scenes, preferably three scenes spaced about 120 degrees apart, so you only see one scene at a time.
Is a closed loop a must so you can see the same train running through the same scene again and again, or do you want to simulate staying at the scene for a while and seeing several trains pass in that time (ie having some kind of staging on both sides of the scene you are watching, so there is room to keep a procession of eastbound and westbound trains waiting in the wings to make their appearance on stage, one after the other ?
Do you want to have a passenger railroad station as one of your scenes ? What kind of station - end of the line or somewhere in the middle of some line ? Small town depot along the line or a big city terminal with a coach yard ?
Do you really need a full freight yard, coach yard and engine service facilities, or could your desire for switching and engine service e.g. be covered by having one of your scenes be a passenger station where a switcher will take off some sleeper cars or a buffet car that will go on another (later) train in the opposite direction, and adding e.g. a mail car to your passenger train consist, while your road engine takes on water and coal (if a steam engine), or refuels diesel (if a diesel engine) ?
There are probably quite a few other questions that could be asked, but you probably get my drift - if you focus your design effort on thinking about e.g. three scenes you want, it becomes easier to consider what should be seen in those scenes and how they should be operated, and thus easier to come up with a track plan.
Smile,
Stein