I am a novice and need help to understand an HO track layout published in ModelRailroader in June, 2008. It was entitled "Montreal Harbour Railway." This is a 9x11 layout that calls for 33" curves down to 24". I need to know if these large radius curves are available. Could I use flex track? Is there a tool that assures true curves?
Thanks for any resonses.
Tertullian
I would suggest using flex track and lay out the curves using a pencil and trammel bar (a wood stick with holes for the pencil and a nail that are spaced exactly 33" or whatever radius you are working with). An old wood yard stick works really well for this, and it has the dimensions already marked on it. When you have the radius marked on your sub-roadbed (plywood or other wood surface), then glue the cork roadbed along the pencil lines, centered on the line. There are a few good books available that show how to do this. I would recommend picking one or two up and read them, they are very helpful. Model Railroader publishes many of these helpful books. Good luck, I am just designing my first layout in over 20 years, and will be doing just this in a few weeks.
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TertullianI need help to understand an HO track layout entitled "Montreal Harbour Railway." This is a 9x11 layout that calls for 33" curves down to 24". I need to know if these large radius curves are available.
Could I use flex track?
Is there a tool that assures true curves?
With a 33" radius curve, you will likely have two pieces of flex (or more) for any given curve. Watch out for "kinks" in the curve where two pieces of flex joint. Soldering pieces of flex before bending them will help keep the curve smooth at the transition between the two pieces of track.
Thanks for the help. I received 3 responses. Two suggested the yardstick method and all three were helpful.
This plan has come up before in this forum.http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/t/128274.aspx
Unfortunately, there are a number of issues with this plan. It's a shame that MR publishes some of these plans without at least mentioning some of the flaws. It implies a level of suitability that is not always present.
Here's what I wrote about it in the previous thread:
This plan has a few things going for it, but overall, I think there are quite a few concerns. On the positive side, there is staging, the use of large industries, a fairly large yard, and calling-out specific track components would help someone to build it. In terms of concerns, the plan does not go very far in exploiting these positives, in my opinion. One of the spurs is only about 4 1/2 inches long when one considers clearance from the adjacent track. That's a single 30' car in HO, and the plan requires a turnout and a crossing to reach it. This is just one of the multiple examples where the trackwork seems overly complex for the operating interest it provides.The large industries seem to have very short tracks to serve them -- and only one track each, for the most part. Not very realistic, in my view. Real-life railroading is driven by large industries which receive many cars each shift, often on multiple tracks.
The single Molson Brewery spur holds about four 34' boxcars total. The large Canadian Rubber Company complex gets by with even fewer. And because those two spurs are connected with the CPR interchange track in an extremely unrealistic switchback configuration, one might have to empty cars from Molson and CPR just to get a couple of cars out of Canadian Rubber. In some cases, it appears the designer did not consider how far away from the turnout the clearance point actually lies -- this limits the useable length of the track.
While these industries are large and have short industry tracks, other industries are very under-sized. A grain elevator measuring 100' by 30' overall is not very plausible, in my opinion. It should be noted that the design is intended for 1912-1914, so cars would be shorter ... but anyone who wants to use this design for the 1950s or later eras would find the spurs very short for later equipment. This grain elevator and the freight shed are reached by another unrealistic (IMHO) switchback that limits movement to one or at most two cars at a time.The design also seems slightly out of balance to me in terms of the amount of yard intended to serve these relatively few and short industry tracks. Reaching the engine terminal seems a little convoluted, as well, but this is a by-product of the tight space.To see what I would suggest is a better approach to this type of layout, consider Russell Schoof's 10'X11' Free Haven Terminal design from the October 1990 Model Railroader and the Kalmbach book 48 Top Notch Track Plans (1993). Schoof's plan also has a couple of problems (for example, the staging scheme is a bit complex and the curves are tight), but those could be easily remedied. This plan has large industries that can actually be served by significant traffic and a yard that is more in balance with the overall traffic pattern (although I would enlarge the yard a bit if one had more space). I wrote about Schoof's design recently in my blog.I think it's a lost opportunity that some of these non-winning 9X11 contest entries are being published without some comments from a knowledgeable editor about the concerns so that newcomers would know what they are getting into. The over-reliance on switchbacks, in particular, plagues many of these plans.Byron
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