Trains Luvr

God knows why I waited till the last moment to order the track and turnouts…believe it or not though, I made changes to my staging plan hours before ordering the parts. In a moment of panic I realized that I could use large turnouts instead of medium, duh. So, I replaced all medium turnouts and then placed the order. In retrospect I’m glad I did this, except that I shouldn’t have waited till the last moment to do it.

There’s 9 boxes of Code 100 track in this box, 3 of which will go into the helix, while the other 6 into the staging. I went through many revisions of my staging level, after settling on the general shape because I couldn’t decide whether to make everything double-ended or not.

At the end, I opted to have the yards in the peninsula stub-ended, maximizing the length instead of having to build custom curved turnouts and what not to match my available space. I will still need to build couple of custom turnouts but not as many as with all double-ended yards.

As I mentioned above, I managed to go with all the large size turnouts, which will ultimately offer an ability to use any rolling stock, up to the modern era, if I ever decide to change the main layout. I believe this to be an important future-proof feature, since staging deck is the lowest one and there’s no altering it once the rest of the layout goes up.

Hopefully, I will figure out all the blocks, power districts and other nuances as time goes by. Never done any of this before, so it makes it even more exciting (and more prone to error, ugh).

I still need to finish the remaining metal benchwork in the lower left corner that has been sitting empty for almost a year.