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Episode 6 - The Things That Keep You Awake at Night AKA Adventures In refinement 3


scottystitch

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Having largely sorted the intermediate station, still with no name, I decided to give it a while before ordering the turnouts.  This would be where the first spike would be driven so I wanted to be reasonably sure I was happy with it.  Almost immediately a sense of, I don't know, not so much doom but something that made me feel a bit uneasy. 

 

Long story short, it became increasingly clear that what had started out as an exercise in creating a layout with a decent scenic area for trains to run through, had grown arms and legs until it was effectively two decent sized stations taking up two sides of the room and the anxiety of a) building it, and b) operating it started to build again, which was the main driver for abandoning the previous project and going down this road the first place.  Whilst the vast majority of the layout was on show, as was the intention, I'd suffered from mission creep.  The largish terminus is fine, but what started out as a small intermediate station now took up a disproportionate size of the other long wall, not to mention what would be required to work it.  A rethink was in order.

 

The result is attached.  A long sweeping single track run from the fiddle yard, along the long wall across the doorway and into a hidden section a little longer than maximum train length. I was struggling with what to do with that left wall. Access is required for the gas boiler, so the curve had to be as compact as possible leading into St Catherine's Bay, which means the approach to St Catherine's Bay is by necessity quite short.  By blocking off that section of the left wall, a train can depart SCB, and if desired be held out of sight, to give the feeling of time passing, before entering the scenic run and off scene;p all this whilst shunting elsewhere on the layout or assembling a train in the fiddle yard.  The same would apply for trains heading to SCB.  I think it's a decent trade off to have that short section of track hidden and to have the rest of the layout opened up to have a nice sweeping run through the landscape.

 

The small branch terminus has now been moved from in front of the fiddle yard to in front of the mainline, and 3.75" below, a scale 46ft.  I still need to come up with a plausible explanation as to why the BLT is there with a mainline thundering past it without serving it.  The obvious answer may be that the main line was built some time after the branch.  I also need to work out what the geology and contour lines would look like

 

The layout of the BLT remains similar to the original copy of St Cyrus with the addition of a short siding next to the loco release in the goods yard.  The two sidings on the left, one for Milk Loading and one for the goods shed, is inspired loosely by CDGFife of this parish Cadhay Sidings.

 

This new arrangement feels so much better already, but I will get into the train room and mock things up, and sleep on it over the weekend to make sure.

 

There comes a point where we have to put the track planning tools down and start to build something...

 

 

 

image.png.27adba3e42b828f48c733c753007e811.png

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