# Please help me end this!!!!



## pat_smith1969 (Aug 21, 2016)

OK so I am not as desperate as the title will lead you to believe. I am mostly done with the track laying phase of my build and am almost ready to go on to the scenery, which I am really looking forward to doing.

The problem is my "yard".. because of some design choices my yard has no straight lines it is all a semi circle. This isn't the end of the world here but I wanted to shop for a few other ideas. 

Below you will see two shots of my yard (laid in temporary track, so don't sweat the kinks just yet).. all the parts that are done are on the brown-ish plaster, my yard is the three lines on the "sea of cork" towards the center of the layout. 

The idea for the yard is to just have a place to park a couple of my locos when not in use. I would prefer that to having to grab them off the layout and put them somewhere..










Below is a picture of my proposed Loco shed (modeled here by the lovely and beguiling Yellow MiterBox). Because of the way the track lays only one of the three tracks can get that far without either coming too close to another track or drastically Exceeding my 22" turn radius.


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## pat_smith1969 (Aug 21, 2016)

A little more background... where the locos are lined up, the bottles are sitting and my "box-o-track" is going to be a lake with a water fall coming down from the upper level allowing for a nice bridge and a picturesque shot of tracks over a gorge.. good stuff.

Between the river/lake/falls...and the cork yard will be a very modest town. I figure they would put up a wall between the yard and the town, both to help with sound and to keep the local kids from getting into things (I suspect there will be some graffiti somewhere, damned kids). 

Up top on the ledge is a farm, another small lake, and some grain silos.


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## mopac (Feb 24, 2011)

I see no reason to keep the yard at 22' radius, Yards are much tighter radius
than the main line. Get some flex track and make it work. Cars can handle much
tighter than 22".


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## pat_smith1969 (Aug 21, 2016)

Won't I get derailments with my SD40-2? I would really like to not have to touch the locos, or at least as little as necessary. Both the Athearn and the Intermountian SD40-2 SAY they can accommodate 18" turns.


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## mopac (Feb 24, 2011)

Sorry, I didn't read correctly. Your engine house is at the end of your yard tracks.
My suggestion won't work with sd40-2s. I was thinking freight cars would be in that area not engines. Maybe a separate turnout of track off the main to your engine house.
But next to the yard. With present set up you probably can't have the engine house at end of the yard and 3 tracks to it.

Come off your main right behind the miter box to engine house. Then you can park a lot of cars in
your yard.


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## mopac (Feb 24, 2011)

With present set up, you would have to keep 2 of your 3 yard tracks clear so
an engine could arrive and 1 leave the engine house. Not much of a yard left then.


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## pat_smith1969 (Aug 21, 2016)

Yeah that is kinda what I was thinking too. I plan to only have 1 track actually go into the engine house, the other two will stop short.. so that does leave me 2 tracks for cars.. but also necessitates the need to remove unused engines from the layout.


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## mopac (Feb 24, 2011)

Yea, I don't know if your engine house will be a 1 or 2 stall. You can also run tracks on either side of engine house for parking of engines. I see you have the mainline glued down already but if you could put a turnout between miter box and your helix off the
main you have plenty of room for the engine house next to yard and then everything 
would not be in a circle. Just my opinion. 1 track off of main and then split that up to 2 or 3 tracks. You just thought you were almost done laying track. HaHa.

Then you would have plenty of parking for cars and engines.


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## DonR (Oct 18, 2012)

Not sure of the geometry since you are using
sectional track, but it appears that if you
used a curved turnout that permits a spur off
of the middle yard track you may make it work.

Don


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## pat_smith1969 (Aug 21, 2016)

I lay down flex track, but I plan routes with sectional track.. that way I am sure I am planning with all 22" curves (give or take a smidge). In this case I am placing sectional track to give me a good idea of what will and won't work with 22" turns.. when I go to glue it all down I will use flex track.

Adding a turn-out off the main is not good for me. I already have a a turnout going from the outter main to the inner main (doesn't show well in these pics) and even if I did add one it would chew up a lot of the room for my small town or if I do it near the "mountain" I will lose some of my natural scenery. 

I will look into the curved turnout idea, just to add a few more lines to park stuff on. This while layout is in SCARM so I will do up some alternate ideas and post them.


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## CTValleyRR (Jul 26, 2014)

pat_smith1969 said:


> Yeah that is kinda what I was thinking too. I plan to only have 1 track actually go into the engine house, the other two will stop short.. so that does leave me 2 tracks for cars.. but also necessitates the need to remove unused engines from the layout.


I'm not sure I follow your logic, here. Why do you have to remove engines? I had a track on my previous layout where I would park 3 or 4 locos. If you want the one in the back, you have to do what real railroads do and shuffle things around a bit. All you need is another location to put the other locos temporarily while you move them, preferrably wothout fouling the main (although a railroad's gotta do what a railroad's gotta do). It looks like one of your other yard tracks would suffice for this, although you could add a turnout and a short stub facing the opposite direction for this purpose.

Edit: I'm assuming you're using DCC, and not trying to isolate the tracks to "park" locos. If not, this is another excellent reason to go DCC.


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## pat_smith1969 (Aug 21, 2016)

So here is what I ended up with. In the below pictures you will see that at the end of my yard the track continues on after the cork ends... I am debating ending the track at the cork, or extending the cork further to get a bit more length out of it.

You can see that one track ends short, I figure this can be a staging area or a place to park crap out of the way. The truth is that had I extended that part the rest of the way it would cause the inner circle to become unusable for the longer locos.


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