Fixing the PRR Coal Run Branch

[Anonymous]

A few days ago I asked for comments on my layout plan. Turns out I missed a very short switching lead that would've essentially cut off a good sized spur.

I went back to the drawing board (computer) and came up with three remedies for the short lead, along with some other tweaks.



http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i301/3373GP4NR/7fd6919b.jpg

The top one is the orignal 2 x 10 design I posted previously. The short lead is on the far right, which turned out to be just ten inches long.

The second plan moved the track three inches to the left on the table. The lead is now 13 inches but the opposite end spurs are corrrespondingly shorter. There was some room to spare there so hopefully the car capacity did not change.

Another comment was that the runaround track was too short. One way to remedy that was to add an escape track to the interchange yard, which required lengthening the whole layout as you see in the third one. (The short lead also increased by another 12 inches.) The effective runaround length is over twice what it was before. The stretch left a blank square at the right end so I reset the upper right spur to fill it and gain three inches of length, more room for load laydown, and a new building.

The last plan is 12 feet long. Here I increased the runaround directly by nine inches, put two of the three inches back in the far left spurs, added a third spur for bulk materials like sand and coal (this is a clay products plant with coal fired kilns), and increased the clear space between the freight terminal and clay works by a combination of movement and truncating the the long freight tracks by six inches. (This will cut capacity there by one car each.) On the plus side the interchange/staging tracks are now a combined 32 inches longer. In the top center I've played with the varnish warehouse plan a little but it didn't affect the track. Oh, the short lead that caused the problem originally is now 16 inches longer than the start as well.

Please look again for any "uh-ohs" I might have missed. Extra eyes are always welcome.

Two things specifically I'd like to hear about:

1) Whaddaya think about the shortening of the freight house tracks? (They still can hold three cars each and I'm maintaing a 32 ft roadway around the ends of the tracks.) I think the additional visual space by the clay works pays for the capacity loss. Am I missing something in operation?

2) The escape tracks in the yard look awkward to me, but perfectly useable as an "emergency" runaround. Would I be better off putting them in sequence like a conventional ladder, or maybe deleting one of the crossovers? The trade off would be a loss in effective runaround capacity vs better realism/visual impression.

Thanks in advance,
Kurt Laughlin