Looks Good!
I see that you have 'L Girder' benchwork - Nothing 'wrong' there. The other option is a box frame benchwork. There is really nothing that cookie-cutter does not do. If neede3d, just cut out more of it if you want just the sub-roadbed profile.
Jim
Modeling BNSF and Milwaukee Road in SW Wisconsin
If in doubt, use your track components to stencil things out on the subroadbed. You'll quickly see if there are problem areas.
For your turnouts, if you'll have anything projecting underneath, make sure you don't locate the throw over a support that will make it hard or impossible to install a swicth machine, for instance.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Thanks for the response. Once I have all the pieces cut I was planning on attaching them all to the grid, and then tracing all of the switch locations. I was then going to lay the track (and cork) outwards from the switches.
Also I did think it would be better to have wider roadbed but it threw off my measurements a bit and was hard to get everything to fit in some places.
You're doing OK. In fact, I was gonna suggest leaving things wider if at all possible. I did with my layout and it's paid off many times when I needed to move or add onto things.
You can always add on or make a new piece if you have something that needs more room. And if it doesn't, having wide shoulders helps with scenery, etc.
If this works for you, lay the inside or tightest radius track first. When you have it to a certain point like cut and laid (doesn't need to be wired or even spiked down), layout some test markings for the rest. Then you'll know for sure it all will fit.
I'm in the process of building my first layout. It's an expanded (5x9) version of the Virginian and I'm using L-girder instead of cookie cutter. My thought was that I could give myself a bit more room for error and have slightly wider curves using 5x9.I spent a lot of time using AnyRail to adapt the plan to 5x9 and making sure I had nothing less that 22" radii and max 3% grades. After much tweaking I got everything to fit perfectly.Now I'm up to the part of cutting the roadbed and finding that its hard to translate the plan exactly to get everything precisely right. If it was a 4x8, I would be able to trace the plan directly onto the wood, but since this is 5x9 I have to cut everything in non-contiguous pieces (I'm making sure that I don't have any roadbed splices under a turnout). Everything seems to be coming together at this point, but I'm worried that when I start laying the track, things won't fit exactly how they did on the CAD program. I spent so much time on the computer struggling to get everything to fit perfectly, and now I feel like I'm fudging it a bit for this phase. So I'm wondering, when doing this process of the layout, do you have to sort of "wing it" to a degree? I guess one advantage of the L-Girder method is that if things don't fit exactly when I start laying the track, I can always cut a new strip of roadbed to correct it and just as needed - but I'm not even sure how to be sure that I'm laying the track exactly how I designed it in the CAD program.
Also, I think I may have made the roadbed a bit too wide. I used a 4" width for the single track climb going around, but I thought again that would give me more room to correct errors when I'm laying the track. I switched to 3" for most of the other pieces of single track.Anyone have any advice to impart here? Two pics of my work : (I haven't attached any of the roadbed yet, just cutting the pieces first.)