When I sat down to design the Hampshire County I knew for years what kind of layout I would have. Having study a lot of John Armstrong's designs and how the design of a layout had change so much from the basic 4 x 8 plywood with an oval of track. When the walk-around design was introduced, I knew that was for me. And with the new wireless throttles now available, the walk-around design is even better. The design of the layout is so you only see the train past threw a scene once in each direction. The feeling of going somewhere is very strong with this design.
As you can see in my layout plan above, it is basically a point to point railroad. The size of the layout is the Barre leg is 22'9" and the Claremont leg is 21'6". The Claremont/Hadley leg is 10'7" and Hadley is 12'1". Unfortunately there are two pinch points. They are both located on the peninsula, one is at the nine-o-clock position and the other is at the twelve-o-clock position. With the height set at 54", I don't think it will be that big of a nuisance to over come. There can only be two operators at a time. That's all I have for locomotives. And then I'll be operating the railroad by myself for most of the time.
As I started building the On2 railroad, I wanted it to be in a finished space free from dust, unpleasant environment, poor lighting and so forth. I did it stages, first the ceiling, then the basement walls were cleaned up and painted with "DryLock" paint along the 18" at the floor, the rest of the walls had a coat of white paint on them so I just painted over it with the finish color. The walls behind Hadley were the two of three walls I built in. The third is along side the stairs and behind Hopedale.
The above plan is Stage one of construction. This is Barre, a small mill town where two mills are located, one on the railroad , the other is off the layout but ships and receives via the freight house. With all the shipping and receiving from both mills plus a couple of other industries using the freight house is the reason for an agent at the station. And too add to the excitement, the spur to the shipping/receiving area of the woolen mill is on a grade down to street level which is 2" below the mainline. I started building from the end instead of the beginning because the mill model was in the Hadley/Claremont area and there wasn't any room to work. So this way I get the mill out of the way and will have some limited operation as construction continues.
To save space I decided to use #5 switches. The max radius would only be 46". I felt with railroad so high, the sharpness of curves and switches wouldn't be as apparent, plus as scenery goes in there will be view blocks in some of the tight spots to help hide them. Then Mike Cougill's book "Detailing Track" came out and everything changed. I have planed to hand lay the track from day one. I really enjoy spiking down rail. And you will be surprise at how fast it'll grow. In Mike's book, he's showing that track is just as important a detail as the locomotives and rolling stock that will be rolling on it. I have always felt this way and planed on using R-O-W's track detail parts for my track.
After reading Mike's book,which by the way you should have. You can buy it from O Scale Trains. The book covers not just laying rail, but also the ballast, texturing and coloring of the track. Anyway back to the railroad. Mike talks about using the biggest switch you can for realism. He uses #10 switches on his railroad, and they look great, but I didn't have the room for anything that long. But I could move up to a #6 switch. I use AutoCad to do my design work. I'm a mechanical designer by trade so it was the cad system of choise. In AutoCad, one of the features are what are called "Blocks". They can be anything you have to draw more than once. I didn't have a #6 switch drawn and saved, so I made one. As I brought the block into the drawing, I discovered that I had drawn the plan with #6 switches and not #5's. The block had been named incorrectly. This is way too cool of a find. Well then if I have #6's, why not a larger radius?
With the sub-roadbed being wooden spline, when it comes to curves it automatically makes it's own easements. So by offsetting the larger curve in toward the center of the curve by about 1/4" and adding in easements I can now use 48 and 50" radii and not lose any space to the large radius.
