Input on a "Temporary" Shelf Track Plan

[steinjr]

Updated Plan - This is pretty close to being exactly as Stein suggested, with some small tweaks.



Thoughts / comments?

Track wise, that should work just fine.

Scenically, I am fond of to trying to put partial buildings or overpasses on the front sides, help hide the "end-of-world" effect a little.

Here is e.g. an older plan of mine, called "64th street yard", based based on Dave Howell's "63rd street yard", where I used two warehouses and an overpass to try to hide how small the layout is:




Here is a plan I called "Federal Street Overpass":



"Foulrift industrial park":





See the pattern? Central runaround, spurs branching from the center out towards the sides, small view block on the right and left at front. But of course, it doesn't mean that you have to do it that way - different people like different types of scenery.

Your layout can be urban (which is what I tend to prefer) or rural. If rural, overpasses and tall buildings would probably look out of place. Then a bit more space would probably look better - sacrificing a car length on the two foreground spurs to make room for a little grass at the end of the spur - stuff like that.

Btw - I just saw your post on the model-railroad-hobbyist forum - I hadn't fully grasped that the layout mainly was intended as test track for cars that needed to be fixed (or was just fixed). If you want the entire thing to be a RIP facility, you can. There is a nice plan of a little larger RIP facility on the Carl Arendt micro layouts site (http://www.carendt.com), just search for RIP there.

But for more of a repair facility, a little more depth (at least a foot) would have been nice, allowing you to have tracks branch out some more and to have tracks go into workshops etc.

But if 7" is the depth you can have, it is the depth you can have. Anyways - good luck with your temporary layout!

Grin,
Stein