April 20, 2012 Track Plan Revisions
April 20, 2012 by markpaulson
Double-click on this photo to enlarge it, so you can see what I'm discussing in this post. A friend of mine has been urging me to draft the fascia for some time, so I thought I'd give it a shot. The light brown line represents where the boundaries of the edge of the layout might be. This tells me two things. How much standing room I have for operating the layout, and exactly what the reach might be to fix things, derailments, etc. Since my effective reach is about 30 inches, the north-east corner of the layout, lower left, where the town of Durango will be modeled, is a concern for me. You can see from the plan that it could be up to six feet to the corner from where I could stand. Although I don't care for "pop-ups", I might have to incorporate one here (as illustrated by the purple line). I could do it without passing through regular track on the layout, and the trolley line (green) is not functional, so splitting it doesn't matter. As long as I don't have any significant weight gain, I can fit in a two foot by three foot opening with no problem. 🙂 Hidden tracks (red) will be accessible from beneath the layout.
I’ve also added another mine, the “Gold King” to the mining area. All of the mines in this area are named after actual mines in the vicinity of Silverton, Colorado.
While you are looking at this version of the track plan, take note of the green trolley line in Durango. It extends from the hills above the town, down through Main Avenue, to the depot, where it terminates in an "armstrong" style turntable. The picture shows one of these in San Fransisco, but the SF cars were connected to an underground cable; my trolley will be horse-drawn. In SF, they have to release their grip on the cable to turn. They can do this because gripping or releasing the cable is how they move or stop. The cable is in continuous motion. On the turntable, the car is turned by the motormen pushing on the metal pipe railings on either side. Perfect balance allows the weight of the car to be minimized.
Even full sized (at least narrow gauge) railroads used these kinds of turntables, because they were inexpensive. Here is one at Laws, California. There is a full-size replica that I have seen at the Orange Empire Railroad Museum in Parris, California. The operators would push on the angled wooden pole at each end of the turntable to turn the engine around, hence the nickname, "arm-strong".
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