Track plan

Recently a reader asked if I had track plan of my layout. I had a drawing in the pipeline and their interest gave me the motivation to do the drawing properly and complete it.

So here is the plan for the Thoroughfare Gap Railroad 1895 in HO Scale, completed with good old paper and pen. I have created a separate page on the blog with a high-resolution copy of the track plan here.

The layout evolved into the current configuration The large island to right the original layout and the track plan was inspired by Ron Hatch’s HOn3 Fulton County Narrow Gauge Railroad featured in  Railroad Model Craftsman Sept 1994. This was alot of fun to build but operations were somewhat hamstrung due to a lack of staging. After a while I started to think seriously about expanding the layout. This was not surprising as I enjoy building scenery and there were a number of signature scenes I wanted to model but there had been no space on the original layout.

I didn't want the scenery on the layout to all be the same. I really liked the 'colour moods' approach to modelling scenery that John Olsen used on his Mescal Lines Railroad. You can find out more about this concept in John's article in the January 1984 issue of Model Railroader.

Following this concept, I imagined scenery transitioning to completely different environments to give the impression of the train going 'somewhere' and so added 'L' shaped corner section in modules up but not including the Erewhon section. This gave me the oppportunity to model the small town of Cass, a turntable, sawmill, decidous and redwood forests and a logging scene.

The mainline continued on past the redwood logging scene to a temporary fiddle yard. This was not satisfactory from an operating point of view. If felt the line needed a natural end point and the temporary staging did not have enough space for all my locomotives and rolling stock. I did not like handling the trains everytime on had finished a run so I built Erewhon section which is actually part of a large shelving unit.

Erewhon is a complete compromise. I only had a certain amount of real estate as it is part of a storage shelf unit. I needed tracks to store and turn locomotives, a run around loop and sufficent trackage to store my cars. I also wanted to have a go at making a snow scene which I wrote a little about here and here.