You make an excellent point, one of many I've not considered.... I'll file this under liking the product so well that they bought the company....
The lumber mill can sell the railroad ties, and Tri-State Fuel and Oil can sell them coal and diesel as well as other P.O.L. items...
Hmmm food for thought
Thanks...
Stein,
As I elude to in another post, I know very little about how to plan this, I do have a good vision for what I want the finished product to look like from a landscape and realism sort of artistic view, but I' learning in process how they do it in the real world, and how to compress it effectively and not make a mess... The resources you present give me yet more tools for doing a decent job on the planning...
In rereading my original post vague would be a kind description... Perhaps Idiot in need of education...LOL.... Anyhow, I absolutely value your insight... And your critique style is fine, Iam not thin skinned, just thick headed.
I hope my retooling is getting closer, atleast it feels as if it makes more sense...
Some things to consider for adding operations value to your layout: Engine service is an industry that requires delivery of sand and fuel, be it oil or coal. provide a separate spur for that near the engine service area. If long enough for two or three cars one spur will be sufficient. The sand dryer is the slowest use so put it at the end, then you can spot and work the fuel delivery car more often without having to pull the sand car every time. Do you intend to have a wrecker or work train to move to different spots around the layout? This can accomplish two things: it can temporarily block a track, requiring slow orders and detours for trains, and it can also mean fitting its "Extra" movements into an already busy schedule. The idea is not just running trains hither and you, it is modelling railroading with a purpose. Enjoy! John
Gentlemen, I do appreciate your long suffering assistance... Your style of critique is fine with me, I'm not thin skinned, but rather thick headed where this is concerned... (I'm sorry for that, I'm an excellent and very organized manager, this should be easy for me and it isn't)I keep going through drafts of this yard and switching/ operating because I am trying to learn and trying to get it right... This time around I've torn it all up and gotten rid of some of the switchbacks, retooled my yard, made some modification to the industrial spurs..
For an intelligent person I feel quite thick headed where laying this out is concerned, I can make it look really cool when it comes to finishing it, but I know so little about how to plan it so it has both form and function... I try to apply what you are saying...
The switchback paradise (I like this and will use it as description of the plan as an illustration of what not to do... ) is gone, and I am looking for better ways to service my industries which include:
a small coal mine- that will supply a fuel company
A logging camp that will serve a sawmill
Penneburgh Plastic Sprue- there are so many you have to do something with them... I'm thinking about an industrial park, but that is a bit modern for my era- mid to late transition...
I tried to use an example from Byron Henderson at http://www.layoutvision.com/gallery/id27.html as a guide and trying to maintain as much of the technical aspect as well as giving an escape on both ends... I don't think for a minute that I'm done, but I think I might have taken a step in a right or atleast better direction...
hi,
i will not repeat all the things Stein said to you, I may sound blunt, harsh and brutal, but my intentions are to help you, so here we go again
I like to get a response, others as well i guess. You will have to take your decisions; i can only give you my idea's, you do the picking. Feel free to ask specific questions, when you e-mail me i will always respond.
Have fun, good luck
Paul
Hi Walt --
Three points, and while the comments may feel to be a bit brutal, they are not meant to be brutal, they are just meant to be constructive.If this style of comments is too direct for you, tell me.
1) I can't see that you are trying to design operations here. Or at least - you are not saying a word about how you want your trains to be operated in the post I am responding to. So the subject line seems fairly misleading.
Some things to think about when designing a layout intended to support running the trains in a prototype-similar way: Byron Henderson's clinic "Op Session Design" from 2004
Some things to think about when running trains on your layout: Richard Schumacher's presentation "Designing Model Railroad Operations" from the NMRA 1999 convention
2) That tangle of switchbacks you have added on the left side of the layout there.
Multiple switchbacks can work well for a Climax or Heisler working it's way up or down a steep hillside on a logging layout.
It very rarely works all that well for a switching layout. It quickly becomes pretty boring (at least to me) to have to go back, forward, back to pick up an outbound car from the innermost spur, then go forward, back, forward, back to drop that car off on the mainline, then go forward, back, forward, back to set out the inbound car, and finally to go forward, back, forward, back to get your engine back to the rest of your train to continue with the next industry.
If you have to remove spotted cars from those pieces of track you need for "forward/back" first, it gets even more tiresome.
I know you have read Craig Bisgeier's check list for yard design.But if you haven't read this piece of well illustrated advice on industrial switchbacks (http://home.earthlink.net/~mrsvc/id16.html) before, I would suggest taking that into account and consider a redesign of the tracks in this area.
If what you are doing here is quite deliberate, and you have thought through the consequences, and this is the way you actually want it, then by all means - your layout, you make the final call.
3) Yard design. My preferred approach is to first figuring out what type of operations I want, and then figuring out how to create a yard design that supports my desired operations, and then figuring out how to fit that design into the room I have available and only then figuring out what track components I will need. I will rework the design iteratively if I have to to to fit things in, and to work on how something look.
But doing a design where you apparently instead use as your point of departure that you have to "use up" the collection of turnouts you have on hand or fill up the space left over, sounds (at least to me) quite a bit like trying to do fine embroidery while wearing a fairly tightly laced straight jacket
It probably can be done (at least by MacGyver), and some people might even enjoy the challenge, but to me it doesn't seem neither fun nor tempting.
Again your (and other people's) mileage may vary. Thankfully we don't all like exactly the same things and do things in exactly the same way - it would have been a pretty boring world if we all had been exact copies of each other :-)
Smile, Stein
Many of you are familiar with this plan, I've been working up different versions of it in process. Now that I have the outer and inner loops the way I want them, I want to add some basic operations, then scale back my yard... This plan doesn't have the yard, just the turntable because I forgot to remove it before I closed RTS...
I borrowed bits from a couple of switching layouts This is of course tentative, but I'd like to design with what I have and not have to buy anymore track... I have a gallon ziplock bag full of straight track, another full of 11" radius,
1 left hand #6 turn out
1 left hand #4 turn out
1 Pair (left and right) #6 turnouts
1 pair (left and right) #4 turnouts
and a pair of double slip switcches
I'd be interested in hearing any better ideas, or even a different bad idea...