The Willamette River Railway - Mainline Design

With the room and the benchwork in place on the CAD drawing we can start the mainline.  Thayne the Viking and I have already pretty much laid it out in our heads, so let's get in down in pixels.

First thing that I'll do is to turn off the layers I don't want to see.  That would be the ROOM DIMENSIONS and the BENCHWORK DIMENSIONS.  Now I just have a picture of the walls and benchwork.  I'll print a few of these off with the grid lines and doodle on them.

 Here is where I start doodling.  Using the paper print outs and a pencil I start sketching.  Thayne wants big locomotives, so we need big curves.  Probably 34" to 36" radius at minimum.  That will fit.  He also needs a long yard.  So I start sketching.  It looks like a twice around with lift outs.

 So I go back to the drawing and throw out 34" and 36" radius circles of track on the drawing.  Let's play with these for a while.

 For a first draft we see we can use the big curves and straightaways very easily!

 

The red circles indicate problem areas.  We have a lift out bridge, some track that stays parallel on a grade split, one area outside the benchwork (which is not a problem) and one track closer than 2" to the wall (our default measurement).

I save that drawing and begin another.  This time I moved the grade separations so they weren't parallel.  I roughed in the yard, move the track next to the wall out a bit, and put in a interchange yard for the area that I think might be the river port.

I'm tired...have to go to bed.  More this weekend.