dbwv69
I've never had any intention of simply copying a whole plan and want my plan to be unique and different from all the rest. What I need is a sense of scale, to give me a better idea of will or will not fit into a 6'x12' footprint.
A lot of published plans have a grid superimposed which tells you how big a scene is.
If not, you can estimate distances by looking at turnouts and crossovers. A crossover consisting of 2 #6 turnouts takes about a foot of length in H0 scale - the rate of divergence is about 1 in 6, and it is 2" between parallel tracks.
A yard ladder of three #6 turnouts (ie having 3 tracks branch off a main in a classical ladder) takes about 30-32" - call it about 2 1/2 feet.
A 40-foot boxcar is about 5.5" in H0 scale (40 feet x 12 inches/foot / 87.1 = 5.51") - so you get roughly 2 40-foot cars (or maybe 3 30-foot cars) to a foot of length. An small switcher engine is about 6" long, but most other engines are longer - about 8" for a typical 4 axle road switcher, a 2-8-0 steam engine with a tender is about 10 1/2" long.
A rule of the thumb for curves should have minimum radiuses at least 2.5 -- 3 times the length of the longest car or engine in your train - for a 6" engine - 15-18", for a 10.5" engine about 26-31" radius. They look better on curves where you view them from the outside if you have curves with radius about 4 times the length, yard and industry tracks where you want to have automatic coupling should have a radius of about 5x the length of the longest piece of rolling stock.
So it has a big impact on your design how long engines and cars you want to run, and how many cars to the train.
So what I do when I start on a design is to draw a typical train and some cuts of cars and use those as yard sticks when messing around with where to start and end runarounds, where to have turnouts, how long leads I have, making sure I have somewhere to temporarily leave cars that gets pulled from an industry while I spot cars and so on and so forth.
All of thes factors means that a track plan pretty much have to be adapted to work for your circumstances and desires, and that you will have to experiment with it anyways.
dbwv69
Sometimes communicating on forums is anything but easy, so I tend to try and only post about what I need without mentioning anything else that may or may not have been done. People tend to focus on things which may have no direct bearing on solving my problem or on things I've already done, which only causes confusion and frustration. I try to avoid it, but invariably it happens anyway.
I would suggest that maybe it would be a good idea for you to drop this complaint, which you have articulated quite a few times earlier.
Forum threads will wander. And sometimes what we think has "no direct bearing" (like the persistent questioning about moving walls) actually turns out to have some bearing on the problem in the end after all.
It may be annoying for you to explain your thinking and give some background, but it is helpful for the exhange of ideas if others understand where you come from and what you are trying to do.
For instance - yoyu have mentioned several times that there are some interesting areas that have caught your attention in other plans. Why not draw a sketch of one or a few of the areas that caught your attention and explain what you like about it, and what the problem you have with applying the concept to your layout is?
Smile,
Stein
