Friday 26 August 2011

Evolution of Design, Part 2

yoIts been a while since my last article on the design stages of the layout, so here we go with part 2. I am going to cover the first couple of versions of the plan, there is about 5 or 6 revisions before the current form.

Version 1.0: (pretty sparse, aint it?)


I got a lot of my inspiration from the CSX Dixie Line, http://csxdixieline.blogspot.com/ - if you see Jamie's plan you'll see I have followed a similar form. I started with a basic form, to get the curvature and basic track plan down. As you can see there is no benchwork integrated on the drawing, just the premise that the width is 25cm for each module, (except the peninsula)

Version 1.0a


From what I can acertain the only difference between this and v1.0 is the addition of basic geometry for the benchork, moving on to:

Version 1.3 (don't ask why I skipped versions 1.2 and 1.1):



After working on the basic geometry on the previous plans, I have further developed this to split the layout into 'modules' to streamline construction. you may have noticed in some of the photos on the blog that the build has been in stages, and that each area is of similar design. I believe at this point operations was starting to become a contributing factor in layout design, as building the CTC Panel started to change parts of the layou to streamline operations.


Version 1.3a:

This version has a slightly expanded yard, and the lineside towns and industries are starting to form. At this point, the towns where known as Alpha, Beta, Theta, and Gamma. Only one of those names exists on the current plan.

The Peninsula is known as Theta, and in the next couple of revisions is one of the more re-worked areas. on this plan you can see there are two areas of theta, both containing branches. since they are lineside on the loop they can become bottlenecks for through freight trains when arranging a cross. Because of this, it was removed in future versions. An inclusion of the double track helix is also a method to reduce traffic congestion on one of the busiest parts of the line, as well as a part with the longest run time between crossing loops.

That will do for this post, next time I'll delve into a double track design, and the reasons why i didn't go down that path.

And to finish, a couple of YouTube videos of trains on Cowan Bank - can't beat the old 44's...


No comments:

Post a Comment