grande man said:
Nice work Roman. Keep us posted on your progress.
Thanks. I spent a lot of hours down there today (it's a completely different world), but my camera's batteries died (I need to find new ones), so no pics for now.
I've installed the ramp for the second deck, made out of Lego's and put the tracks on it and over the bridge. Suprisingly it worked out ok, exept for two major problems:
1. Cars came off the ramp at dangerously derailing speeds and right into a curve
2. Engines refused to go uphill onto the ramp.
So I tore the bridge/ramp down and now needed to rebuild my layout again.
I've been thinking a lot about my layout and realizied that when I planned it on paper, I focussed on industrial switching too much, and not the actual operations. So I tore 90% of it down, moved the rest around a bit and now have myself a "brand new" layout.
Some of its highlughts:
- The depo's tracks are the same as before, exept now they connect to an actual yard.
- The yard is 4slidings wide by about 5 feet. Before it was... See the middle photo in my previous post. That was the "yard".
- A 6feet long sliding along the mainline, allowing for trains to be stored there. I think I doubled my overall "train storage" capacity on the layout, before they either had to block the industries or the mainline, now they can rest in 3 comfortable long slidings.
- The mainline looks doubletracked now, thanks to the mentioned slidings. Before it was just "another track".
- The passenger station is drive-throw now, a sliding from the mainline basically, just like the real pass. stations.
- The yard allows for pretty good switching manuvers and has a special short spur for 2 Geep switchers and a caboose.
- I now have less industries, but at least I can now make pick-ups from them, take the cars to the yard, then onto a mainline freight. Much more realistic that way. One industry is larger then the others, it has 2 parrallel spurs, making it look much more realistic then the short 2-3 car spurs I had going off of the mainline before
- No more spurs off the mainline that allowed trains to fly off the table. They're simply gone now.
- More flat space to put in buildings and the Lego subway, before it was too crowded.
I know that seems confusing, but once I get the camera going, I'll climb up on a chair and take an aerial shot of the whole thing.
To make the explanation easy, before I had the layout physcially ecided into two 4x4 squares, one of which had the industrial switching, with the other one having a yard, depot and pass. station. While the industries were dominating, the yards didn't like their lack of space.
So the yard occupies one hald of the table (2x8 roughly) with everything else on the otherside. Now I can use the tables 8foot length for a long and more realistic station.
Final note, my IHC BN C-Liner is working much better now then it was even a month ago for some reason. Before it went forward ok and refused to go backwords. Now it goes forward pretty good and does a fine job pushing cars going backwards. It restored my faith in IHC.
Sorry for the bad spelling, but it is rather late.