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Jarrell, I presume you have the Armstrong book on track planning??? My question is what type of railroad do you envision in your space??? Scenery??? Type of trains??? Do you know what scenes you want to model??? What is your balance of scenery to operations??? It seems to me that there are two basic type of layout designs (with a huge number of variations): The spagehetti bowl and the point to point. Most layouts are a combination of the two ideas. The spaghetti bowl is named for its appearance. Most layouts have some of this look. It is mainly where the modeler crams track everywhere it will fit. Because there is always limited space this is a common practice. Even very spacious layouts are still way too full of track when compared to the prototype. The problem with the spaghetti bowl is when you try to scenic it. How do you make it look good??? For example in your plan you have less than a foot between the two tracks in spots, this may be hard to scenic convincingly. Point to point tries to mimic what a real railroad does. The modeler tries to avoid running through the scene more than once. single tracks running from destination A to B. In a true point to point there is no return loop and no possibility of a loop to watch trains go around. Most modelers who do point to point designs include some sort of loop provision to watch trains run. These layouts are easier to scenic because there is less track and they mimic the real thing, hence look more realistic. Many modelers pick scenes they like from real railroads and then try to shrink them down to fit on the layout. This tends to improve realism. Observations: 1. You might want to pull your track in from the front of the layout a bit. 2. Switches in the back, in the corner will be hard to reach. 3. Try hiding your turnback tracks in tunnels on at least one of your ends. 4. You might consider closing the circle on each end and running both ways on a single or double track mainline track through the straight sections of the layout. It would give you more possibilities scenically speaking and would avoid the spaghetti bowl look of too much track in a small space. The disadvantage is no real long trains and no "kick back and let em run" without automation. The double track eliminates this problem. 5. Consider hiding a lot of the back track so that you have a single track through the scenes.. Hopefully this is not too over the top....
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