Chimer

I'm flattered, and now I've found it. But it'll be a few days, what with Christmas and all! But 9' x 6' with no operating wells is not something I've ever contemplated .....

You seem to be strangely worried by the prospect of "mistakes" on handover - are your operators banned from talking to one another? Also, it seems entirely prototypical that if a departing train is stopped waiting for its next operator (let's call that "held at the advanced starter"), shunt moves would be blocked for the duration. Just thinking aloud ....

Much more operationally interesting to me, though I would suggest the siding at the station should be trailing off the top side of the loop, rather than facing off the lower line. You do have course have the possibility of reversing trains in the turnback sidings by sticking a different loco on, leaving the original train engine to do the same thing for a subsequent departure. You just have to decide whether you are picky enough to require a loco last seen heading towards Barrow to next be seen heading towards Carlisle. If you do, adding the two sidings shown in green in the schematic below would provide good places for locos to wait for their next turns (or switch them using a locolift).

I would have assumed (always a bad idea 🙂) that if the loco shed is accessed from the main line away from the station, locos would use the up to go on shed and the down on their way back, with trailing access to the shed from from one line or the other and an adjacent trailing crossover. But maybe not so these days with rationalisation and "cleverer" signalling?

I've always liked the idea of modelling a burrowing/flying junction, but they do take up a lot of space to do properly with manageable gradients. Would be a bit odd in the OP's vision, as it is his main line which has to do the burrowing, and the gradients would be brutal if restricted to the 3m space. If the junction could be positioned on the board at the right of the room it would be more feasible - this is of course true for either junction option.

There are basically two ways to arrange the junction and helix as I think you want it .... a burrowing junction (top) or a more normal double junction using a diamond. I've assumed you want the helix to exit down the left hand side of the layout, but don't know what you want to do with the tracks after that. Does it actually need to be a helix, with all the accompanying complications? I can't see how you could possibly arrange things so the helix is at the right hand side except by mirroring the whole thing, which wouldn't have the tracks diverging in the way you have described. Either way, the main lines need to lose height quickly (at least 3") to get under the branch before the start of the helix. If you used the simple double junction with the main lines descending behind the branch lines instead of in front of them, that would ease that problem, and make it easier to arrange access to the yard you also want on this side of the layout. Hope this gives you something to think about ....

Perhaps work on the principle that the town is your side of the baseboard, access the station yard via a level crossing on the curve, then just set a stone wall in front of an open countryside backscene, maybe with a few trees between the two to disguise the lack of depth? Low relief would have to be the backs of buildings as there's no room for a road in front, and there's always an issue where a low relief building meets the backscene. I think the 3-D to 2-D transition is one of the hardest things to get right, and really applaud those who do it well.

This is an attempt to capture the "spirit of Darlington" in the space available in bedroom 5. I think I've only lost the "Up sidings" from the original schematic. The larger of the 2 rectangles over the platforms is meant to represent the canopies and the other the main station building, the latter trying to act as a view blocker for the horrible tight 90 degree turns required in the bottom right corner. The canopies would have to be too grimy to see through at the right hand end! It would obviously be easier to hide the turns with some roads and buildings above track level in the corner, but that wouldn't look at all like the original. Compromises, compromises

Given radius 4 set-track is 57cm, I would use that in preference to trying to get flexi smoothly round at 60cm. I'm sure it can be done, especially if you use an appropriate tracksetta and a single length of flexi, but I wouldn't trust myself to avoid a kink.

To give you some idea of what you're trying to fit in, this is the left hand Doncaster throat from South Junction to the platforms, drawn in XTrackCad using Streamline medium points and 3" wide platforms. With space at each end to turn the mainlines down into a roundy-roundy setup, you're looking at 16 feet or so minimum ... Best of luck!

Ah - that explains why when I found photos of the station, I couldn't tie them in your plan .....

I can see that would be fun to operate in many ways, but from a purely track planning point of view, I'm afraid I wouldn't start from here! My first thought was that some of the sidings are too short to be useful, most notably the "coal dock" at St Clement. I would definitely lose one siding from the St C goods yard, and I can't see how you could get a parcels van into the parcel dock. But as you've spotted, St C isn't operable anyway as the well is too small. I also didn't like the parallel bi-directional tracks masquerading as a double-track line up the left hand side. I think St C and Port Meadow would have to be combined visually into a single through/terminal station "south" of a single operating space. The through and terminus sections could still be operated separately when you have multiple users. Freight traffic maybe confined to the continuous run, with a single goods yard at Jericho. The other major hostage to fortune is the top left hand corner airily labelled "removable for door", which looks as if it would be a world of pain in practice. Only in theory, mind!

Well, it would obviously work and doesn't suffer from "too cluttered" syndrome. I think I'd want a passenger service too, and would try to keep the option of running it as a through station if there was any way you could run a DMU over the level crossing into a hideaway of some sort. I think in real life the kickback siding would have come off the loop rather than the grain siding, i.e. with the two points swopped round, as this would make it so much easier to shunt. Best of luck!

Very nice @Harlequin - and of course the right-hand side could be a mirror of the left, with the exit at the top of the plan, if the builder wanted to gain extra space down the right hand side of the room at the cost of having variable length storage roads.

Using the points "south" of the station to allow you to access all FY roads from all running lines makes all three roads through the station bi-directional - this is not "unusual", it's impossible to even imagine! It's your railway, but .... I'm sure with a minimum redesign, your 3 circuits could plausibly be made to look like a double-track main line and a single-track branch line diverging from the main as the tracks leave the station heading south.

Yes, v1 was quick and dirty last night, switching the points as suggested obviously better when it comes to fitting in the fans .... And I agree entirely with @The Johnster about whether all lines need to access all hidden siding loops - was just answering the question as asked!

Some variation on this I think ... medium radius points here. Best of luck!

Leaving aside the private siding for the moment, for me the most significant difference between the two designs is the length of the runround loop - in version 2, it's very short. So I'd go for v1, but with two roads to the bufferstops at the right hand end, as per v2. Now the private siding - I can't see any way of working it (in either version) that doesn't require both bits of the loop to be clear. Which means that all the wagons in the incoming freight need to be be got out of the way, which means you need longer sidings in the goods yard, but that's easy enough. Hope that helps, probably not ....

OK, Cab Control ... with apologies to those who have seen this pic before. This shows 3 circuits (or other electrically separate sections) with 2 controllers. If you want to use 3 or more controllers, you would need to use multi-way rotary switches instead of the simple double-pole double-throw switches shown here. The basic idea is that if you want to shift a train from one section to another, you switch both sections to the same controller and drive across the insulated section break (in your setup, over the crossover between the circuits). Note that while the whole point is that you can connect more than one section to the same controller, you cannot (even by mistake!) connect two controllers to the same section simultaneously. The lines going off to the right from DPDT2 just represent the possibility of having multiple feeds to the same circuit. There now usually follows an argument about whether it's better to use single-pole switches and a common return, and therefore less wiring. I just happen to like it the way I've shown, which I think is completely bombproof ....

I'm uneasy about the "sort of" return loop created by feeding the turntable from two directions (5 o'clock and 7 o'clock in the pictures). I think I would just feed the turntable from 5 o'clock and use the 7 o'clock road just for the sidings / terminal platforms. And (no surprise to some!), for DC I would recommend cab control so two circuits can be switched to the same controller when you want to pass things across. Much better than trying to get two controllers to agree! Pretty simple switchery, pictures available on request ..... Edit: oops - I meant turntable from 7 o'clock and sidings from 5 o'clock, sorry!!

Some people tend to avoid them, and I didn't need them to make it work ...

My final version, with smoothed out approaches ...... (and no curved points)

Yes, but each "bit of wood" (girder) is the ply sandwich I described, not a single strip of ply.

Isn't a single girder in this context two strips of ply sandwiching bits of softwood? So the ply can be 6mm but the whole girder will be something more like 30mm?

If you put the crossbracing on your plan, at scale width, you can sometimes just shuffle the points around a bit to keep the tiebar areas (where the motors attach) clear of the bracing. And apart from the edge bracing, you can of course shuffle the braces too, nobody's forcing you to have a neat 1 foot (or whatever) grid ..... Or surface mount the motors under a platelayer's hut or similar.