Etch a Sketch

"The Devil is in the details. And in most of my wife's casseroles."
- Pedro

Now we have a rough idea of where the main line is going to be. We've got a good climb to the mountain and the rough review of the grades shows that we are in good shape. Notice the pattern here? I don't try to perfect anything while I'm designing. I just get it pretty close to what I think I want. The reason I do this is that if you try to finalize each step, you lose flexibility to change and you'll waste a lot of time trying to make something work that you will just have to rip up later.

Once the rough main is drawn, I like to switch back to paper and pencil. The CAD system will let me print the drawing out and will give me the grid lines.
What a mess! I took both a black and red pen and began to doodle. What I'm looking at is the scenery detail. Where are the mountains? Where are the tunnels? What will the layout look like? By sketching, which is ALWAYS faster than CAD drawing no matter what your local nerd tells you, you can rough out the topography. Notice the note to the right about the window view! A friend of mine name John Travis build a helix and opened up one section of track and put a "vignette" seen in the whole with some lighting. The affect was amazing and I've done this on two layouts with great success. The track in this area will be hidden, but I don't want to hide it. Mainly I need a mid-way station stop. So we'll put a hole in the side of the layout!

Normally I would throw this and about twenty other first sketches in the trash, but I really like this layout just as it is. So, we are going to stay on version 1.00. For now, anyway.

I've saved the CAD drawing under a new revision number and added a drawing title block. This is a start block and I'll increase its size and add the scale/gauge/etc later.

So let's repair some problems:

Problem 1: the grade on the right side bridge approach may be too steep for the grade clearance.

The loop was originally inside the outer loop (red arrow) which made the grade a bit too tight to make the 4.5" clearance that I need for the bridge. So by pulling the loop out over the loop below it (creating a tunnel situation for the lower track) I've lengthened the run and made the grade stay closer to the ruling 2% grade that I've chosen as my standard.

Problem 2: Where to put the town of Madimi?

There are lots of places to put Madimi, but the must be at zero elevation. Basically we are looking at a section of benchwork off of the design we have now, or somewhere wedged in to the current design. Hey! Why not put the town under the big bridge!

For the town we need a smelter, and engine house, a warehouse, an oil distributor and a section of the MCRR. An O scale smelter is the size of the layout itself. These are enormous buildings and would take more than a year (and tons of pesos) to build. We could, however, just build the area of the structure that receives raw ore. Let's sketch it.


The whole town complex won't fit under the bridge, so I split it up. Engine servicing and the town proper are on one side, and the industrial complex are on the other. I like it so let's see how it looks in CAD.

Here we have the new town. I've put in a warehouse/oil distributor track, a smelter track and an loco servicing track. The passing siding are still not in, but we'll do them later. The O standard gauge MCRR line dwarfs the tiny 30" track. I did this on a module once and it made for a great effect of showing how tiny the trains really are.

Problem 3: There is not enough room for the mine complex.

Let's blow out the loop like we did on the last loop! While we are at it we'll put in the passing siding, the tipple and the empties siding. Better put in a warehouse, too.
Ok, instead of blowing the loop out, I left it the same size so that I can get more jagged rocks in to the picture. There is still room for mine structures, albeit small ones. The tipple may actually go on the loop and that way we can feed empties in, full cars out. We could also put a low relief tipple on the passing siding area.

It's starting to look more like a layout now!

Please feel free to post questions and comments!