016 The Augusta Railway - Yard Lead Repair

What I normally do with a layout design is to put it away for a few weeks, then come back to it and run trains.  Normally I find about 1,000 things that I don't like!  So, at 6:00 am on a Saturday when everyone is asleep, I ran some trains.  The yard lead is surely a problem!

I put a model of an NW2 locomotive, like the one I just purchased, and began to work the yard.  I filled up the longest yard track with a cut of four cars, hooked up the locomotive and backed the train out of the yard right the the end of the yard turnout.  My locomotive was fouling the siding, as well as half of a freight car.  The rule is that you should be able to work the yard without interfering with mainline or key siding trackage.

Here you can see the yard track coming into the siding just before the highway.  There is also another turnout for the engine repair facility.  Why don't we combine all of  this and make a longer lead track (or drill track as some folks call it.)

I moved the turnouts and that messes up the hidden staging loop, so I removed all the trains from the track and corrected the loop, without interfering with the radius.

When that was done I "grouped" the yard trackage and reattached it to the new lead track.

With the lead track moved out, now I can connect the service track.

Here you can see the new, longer lead, and the service track.  It is MUCH nicer than before and allows the Southern Railway to come in and drop off a whole cut of cars without interfering with Augusta Railway work on the main line.  One problem that I have is that the two turnouts are in the street and they aren't giving me 100% of the yard lead that I could have, so I moved them to the left.  Then we'll touch up the street.

Never make track improvements without testing them.  I fired up the NW2 switcher, grabbed a cut of cars and shoved them into the yard.  As you can see from this picture, the whole train (longest possible yard track train) fits between the turnouts!  Perfect!