Planning the Layout - Pt. 2: Turning Concept into Plan

It should be obvious by now that I have put a lot of thought into this layout - perhaps overthought it - but I have come to see how the layout has benefitted from the process.  As my collaborator and builder told me when he looked over my plans, "You made a lot of mistakes in planning your layout, but the good thing is that you made them all in your head," adding that it is better to think through every scenario and draw it out before committing it to benchwork and beyond.  I'm inclined to agree.

Once I had a concept, the plan was the result of adapting the concept to the room I had to work with (in this case the room I had built for it).  My concept, from my long-winded prior entry, is a freelance interpretation of the Ogden Depot and mainline UP and SP operations that feed it.  With this freelance I'm taking liberties in the station itself, along with the mail and express terminal operations. The layout is designed around a complete terminal operation, including passenger, mail, freight, commissary, engine facilities and even the coal-fired power plant for the station.

This station complex takes up an area 3'x32' with the remainder of the layout being mainline loops. the layout is on two levels of the same footprint, each with a complete and level loop operation and a central feature.  On the lower level under the station, having the same footprint, is the yard used for staging and operations.  The yard is planned around two ladders connected with a crossover, which allows for an East Yard (UP) and West Yard (SP).  Ogden had two yards serving the two roads, but space constraints forced me to compress them into parallel yards.  Freelance makes this ok.

Here is the first plan I drew, which conveys the concept:

Above is the main level showing the central straight area as the terminal, with the two peninsulas serving as the mainline and loop track. This plan formed the basis for the benchwork, which follows this exact footprint.  The track plan changed slightly to accommodate the operation drawn out here.

Detail of the Downtown Peninsula showing track and street placement.  This urban peninsula is built around a loop for turning trains in and out of the terminal and creating a panarama of dense urban scenes full of visual interest.  The street arrangements allow long vistas through the heart of the city (15' long) where the tracks and trains are an itegral part of the urban landscape, rather than compete with it for attention.   The plan shows placement of the mainline loop and possible street arrangements.  Note elements with question marks (?) indicating ideas that are not fully-developed but have strong potential.  Many of these ideas were developed fully and refined when the benchwork was built. 

This lower level track plan is more simplified because the footprint in benchwork is identical to the main level above and because the mainline operation is a simple loop over the two peninsulas connected through the yard complex.  

That's all there is to the plan, really.  When construction began I found out how good the plan actually is.  That is not to be immodest, but rather to observe that its simplicity became extremely adaptable to the compromises we've had to make in actually building the layout. Layout-building is the art of compromise, and starting with a clear plan and concept better prepared me for dealing with compromises as they inevitably arose.  

Now I turn attention to the benchwork, which I'll elaborate in several posts with pictures of the techniques we used.