Yup! That'd be the one! Like I said, a necessary evil.
There's also an "S" curve just above the yard.
You know, you could build in an escape to the inner circle so you don't have to back out. It'd unfortunately create another "S" curve, but I guess you aren't going to be going 80mph through here anyways, are you? Anyways, you could do it by adding a couple of turnouts where I drew the red line.
I wanted to accomplish several things for this layout, which has to be 2.5' X 4' maximum.
1.) Run two trains at the same time.
2.) Have a trucking station like that of a typical St. Johnsbury trucking terminal in the early '90's.
3.) Small main street town (like my hometown of Lima, NY)
4.) Rail yard.
5.) Two-three switching side tracks.
6.) Two grade crossings.
One of the mainline tracks will either be slightly higher or lower than the other to make it look like there isn't that much of an obvious flat terrain on this layout. This layout, as some of you may remember in the December 1994 issue of Model Railroader, was loosely based on Soo's Red-Wing division in that article. I actually built this layout when I was a kid in HO scale, but now I'm moved on to better things in N scale. I also plan on adding rolling hills between the tracks to make the trains "disappear" as much as I can.
I left either the top left side or the bottom right side open for extensions if my wife lets me have more room. But for now, I like it!