I
understand the financial and space issues, but small loop layouts usually do
not hold my interest. When you do one, the structure modeling has to be first
class to draw your eyes away from the loop. Folks like Dave Vollmer (http://thevollmerfamily.com/Pennsy/)
can pull that off but I doubt very much I could do a good job with my skill
set. And you need things like mountains or tall buildings to break up the
scenes and hide the loop.
Personally,
I would have to bend the tracks and use a lot of tunnels to make the grandkids
guess where the trains would appear next. I was fortunate, the track plan I
used on my old 4'x8' was very flexible and even allowed significant operations.
To
my horror, when I moved the 2 Woodbury modules from the garage to the loft and
contemplated adding two temporary end loops to get things running, I will have
a flatlands big loop at the end of the Phase 2 construction. 16'x6' but still a
big loop with no mountains to hide tracks.
[Phase
3, if it ever gets done, will have both window ends going left to where the
desk structure will either be removed or have holes running through it for: 1)
the Walnut Lane high arch bridge over the Schuylkill River; 2) Philadelphia's 30th
street station (with fake station tracks and the bridge high line transfer
tracks); and 3) a yard with a hidden turn-back. (That's a packed 17'+!)]
I
believe for the short term I can pull this off with 3 staging yards and still
run a challenging operating session running all the scheduled PRSL trains. The
morning and evening 6 commuter trains will be covered by 3 regular heavyweight
passenger trains and RDCs doing double duty. (The loop will actually come in
handy.)
Enough
staging and I should be able to run the 6-7 scheduled freight turns that ran
through Westville and Woodbury each day. (At least that's the plan!).
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