Here's your JPG imbedded in a post. You can use the "insert/edit image" button in the message editing toolbar to insert any image at a given URL.
A few things after a quick look:
The first thing that jumps out is that the freight house is right at a couple of turnouts. If this is a rail-served freight house, then any cars spotted there will be in the way of other trackage, especially any trains coming from staging. Same thing with the industry in the lower-right.
I'm not sure about the triple-bridge setup on the right. It seems to me that a railroad wouldn't want to build three bridges there, especially since the water feature seems small. A culvert under all three tracks might look more natural.
If you haven't seen them already, here are some good resources for track planning that may help:
Byron Henderson's Layout Vision
LDSIG's Primer
Spacemouse's beginner's guide
John Armstrong's book Track Planning for Realistic Operation
hi,
three problems:
1) you are optimitic about the width of your shelf. Six tracks and an inch extra along the front and back leaves you with only 2 inches for the "river".
2) I am just curious how you will add staging. In one of his Wingate plans Tony Koester has split up a 8x4 board into three pieces. The ones to left and right for staging and only the middle one for the pike. Staging area's together twice as big as the modeled part seems a bit out of balance. However it shows how important to Tony's mind staging is.
3)The industrial spurs are very short. Plants with their own spurs were big.
Paul
Hi Attila --
I've been looking at your track plan to figure out what your vision is. To me it seems like you are trying to cram in too much in your available space.
A 10 foot shelf layout in H0 scale is really no place (IMO) to cram in an engine terminal, unless the whole layout is one big engine terminal. Also, IMO, a H0 scale layout this size is really a switching layout, not a routing/classification layout.
Your main focus is (apparently) doing local industrial switching with very short cuts of cars (4-5 cars). You are not modeling a division point yard. You are not modeling long hauls of trains, where you stop along the road to refuel or re-coal, you are not modeling a place where you would add or drop off engines to push a heavy train up a hill, you are not modeling a classification yard.
So why do you need water, coal, an ash pit, diesel fuel and even an engine service facility?
First thing I would do, if I was you, would be to decide whether I want to model industry switching, or whether I want to model an engine service terminal.
If what you want to model is local switching, then don't do two of each thing. Space is precious on a small switching layout. I would recommend focusing on industry switching with one of the railroads, and just have a transfer run of the other RR deliver cars to an interchange track somewhere. Also - it is often better to have fewer and bigger industries (that look like they need rail service), instead of having many small industries.
Three separate sets of staging tracks seems a bit excessive for a small switching layout.
Finally - I would recommend drawing up a rough room plan that shows how much space (and where in the room) you can have a permanent layout set out, and where you can put staging.
Smile, Stein
AMZs model the Grand Trunk and Boston & Maine trackage and operations in the region between Cascade Mills and Berlin, NH
Looking for more information on this area.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin,_New_Hampshire
Okay - we are talking paper industries here. Brown Paper Co, to be specific.
Berlin is in Coos County, NH.
Link from Wikipedia to Brown Paper historical photos 1885-1965:http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/browse/
I would at least look at tags Railroad, Trains and Buildings
This image e.g shows a nice scene: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/49
No pics on Coos county, New Hampshire in the HABS/HAER collection at the Library of Congress-
Place doesn't seem to have bird's eye view in http://www.bing.com/maps, but it is possible to locate the mill buildings (and roughly locate the tracks) at Berlin and at Cascade (about 2 miles south of Berlin).
So - one (of several, I am sure) possible themes for a transition era shelf layout - a largish paper mill (e.g the one at Berlin), with a few holding tracks (a small yard) where inbound cars are dropped off or picked up by one railroad, and where another railroad is doing the local switching inside the paper mill.
Probably would look better in N scale than in H0 scale if you want to give the impression of quite a few cars being handled at the mill - a 5 foot track will hold about 10 H0 scale 40-foot cars, or about 18 N scale 40-foot cars.
Anyways - I would recommend looking more at pictures of the area, maybe visit the area if possible, and think about _what_ you want to model.
Had another look at that "Beyond Brown" photo collection web site.
Very nice tool for model railroading prototype research of a transition era paper company - seems like they have about 35000 digitized photos from the period 1880 - 1960 or so online, and you can search by year fairly easy - just change the year in dy parameter in the URL below
http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/browse/?dy=1950
Lots of nice pictures showing tracks and buildings, cars being loaded or unloaded etc.
If you also choose tag Exterior in the menu on the right side (ie use URL http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/browse/?dy=1950&post_tag=Exterior) then you only get photos showing the exterior of buildings etc - not portraits and indoor pictures etc. 149 just for 1950, 271 for 1951, and so on and so forth.
Here is e.g. an exterior view showing tracks in the Cascade Mills: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/34706
Grin,Stein
AMZs Most of the trackage is actually very similar to the actual ones, for which there is a great info at ( http://www.sullboat.com/GT.htm)
Excellent source of information - you must have one of the best documented prototypes in model railroading history
Only problem now is to decide which of your four scenes (Berlin Mills, Cascade Mills, Cascade Interchange or Berlin Yard) you most want to model a part of. What is it that most fascinates you about this area and this era ?
AMZsAs for the staging, two 1/2" MDF boards are set aside to (temporarily, when operating) join the ends of the layout; one is L shaped with a generous radius, the other (right) is about 5' long, these should provide enough staging for the rather limited length trains (4-5 cars) that I plan to run,
Hmm - I keep thinking about this track plan - could you explain this part of your setup a little more thoroughly? How large is left staging (the L-shaped part) ? What does the actual room look like ?
Looking at the four areas you have track maps of, I'd say that the scene that immediately seems like it would be the easiest to base a linear track plan for small switching layout on is the Cascade Mills part:
Take the left end of this scene - up to and including a small part of the Towel Mill. Collapse the V-shape divergence between the mill and the main on the right so the main runs parallel, move the Gorham warehouse left to the extreme left front of the scene.
And you may have the beginnings of a scene, left to right : Gorham Warhouse at front left, river scene at rear left, boiler house and cascade mill along the center back of the scene, one or two Cascade Mills East Yard tracks to the front center (maybe one double ended, to function as a drop-off for interchanged cars), Tissue mill to the front right.
Staging (operationally representing Cascade interchange) to the left of the scene, access behind Gorham Warehouse.
Operationally, you could let one of the railroads pull a transfer run of few car out from east staging to leave at the double ended siding in front center of scene, then have the other RR switch the industries, where most of the industry tracks and the yard tracks both branch off towards the right, with Gorham (and possibly an invented track down to the river) branching off to the left.
Hmmm. I wonder ....
Here is a sketch of the idea I was thinking about earlier this morning:
As you can see, the design changed quite a bit while fiddling around with the tracks - quite a few tracks got deleted in the yard area, and the boiler house ended up on a switchback at left rear (to use valuable background space more efficiently).
Here is a slightly modified plan, with more workspace (another industry yard track):
What maybe is applicable for you from the design above is the idea of thinking of the main part of the shelf layout as a theater scene - think about your backdrop structures (which allows you to build _wide_ and _tall_ structures that look like they would need use rail service, even on a fairly narrow shelf), where the structures supposedly continues into the backdrop, to delineate the left and right end of the scene with smaller foreground structures that looks like you see only a small part of the structure, and a fairly open center front (for access).
Nice proposal Stein. Just a question and a remark.
The line through East Yard ends at the right side of the plan. Was this the interchange with the |Grand Trunk as well?
The original plan had no extension on the left side. Staging could also be done here with a cassette.
BTW adapting cassette staging onto the extension is opening up even more oppertunities. The staging track can be used as switch lead as well; so you could make the mill scene even longer and an other industry could be added along the lead.
Keep smiling and having fun
BTW thx Stein, never known you could find that much on the net.
Paulus Jas The line through East Yard ends at the right side of the plan. Was this the interchange with the |Grand Trunk as well?
I found an online 1942 topographical map of the area (http://docs.unh.edu/NH/grhm42nw.jpg) showing that the Boston and Maine (B&M) came in along the Moose River and crossed over the Grand Trunk to run along the right (east) bank of the Androscoggin River from Gorham/Upper Village to the industries along the east side of the river in Berlin. Not sure if the B&M continued past Berlin or not.
The Grand Trunk ran along the left (southern/western) bank of the Androscoggin River from the east/NE past Gorham, then past Cascade Mill (which probably was served by the GT) and up to Berlin, before turning left away from the river in the western part of Berlin.
Interchange seems to have been on the B&M (east) side of the river between (just north of) Cascade Mill and Berlin, with a bridge across the river from the GT side.
OP posted a link that showed the interchange tracks at Cascade, too:
The original plan had no extension on the left side. Staging could also be done here with a cassette. BTW adapting cassette staging onto the extension is opening up even more oppertunities. The staging track can be used as switch lead as well; so you could make the mill scene even longer and an other industry could be added along the lead.
Sure. OP mentioned having set aside some pieces of wood for staging both on the left ("L-shaped with wide curves") and on the right ("five foot long board").
But since he didn't mention much details, it is hard to know how much space he actually has available to the left of the layout. So I assumed a minimum of 2 feet towards the left, and six feet downwards from the corner. Wouldn't hurt any if he has more space than that available.
The OP is very lucky with this railroad - you can (almost) always find some useful info, but it is rare to have quite this much information available on the prototype on the net - even right era maps, track plans and photos.
Btw - a pile of URL's to pictures from the Cascade Mills area:
1955 Cascade mills: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/347061959: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/248041959: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/243351962, Clay storage tanks: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/197811962, from Highway: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/19493http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/img/9/2850964457.jpgHighway crossing, 1943: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/9954http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/9986http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/9955
1943 West yard, near boiler house, cascade Millshttp://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/10316http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/10317
1950 new sign, http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/77441962 Aerial photo: http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/3971
Grin, Stein