Finished Track Plan

Finished drawings are listed on the left of the Blog screen. I'm very interested in getting your comments before I call this complete. Thanks! Scottgperry@comcast.net.


Final overall track plan.

Benchwork drawing.


Track and Grade detail.

Structures.

Time for Structures!

"And just how are you going to build an adobe trailer park?"
- Pedro

It is now time to add the structures as the track plan is pretty much completed and the grades checked. I'm really liking this railroad! Let's start with the mine. I always like to add mandatory structures first, then ancillary ones. That way you make sure your priority buildings get their fair share of real estate. In O scale, you can run out of room fast.
Just some CAD tips here. I draw my drawings in layers. A layer meaning all like components are drawn together and saves as a separate and distinct group, and usually all one similar color. These layers can be turned off and on so that you can either focus on them or move them to work on other areas. Not sure if I really explained that well. So here I'm starting a structures layer and making it brown. I do this with every layout. I'll leave it on as I work with them and turn the Grade layer off.

The mine complex needs several buildings. I'll start with the main power and machinery building. Power is generated from a oil fired boiler. We'll put double doors on it and make it a machine shop. Its the largest mine building at one foot long and six inches wide. This is so that the interior can be detailed if we want it to be.

The powerhouse can move around so I just kind of sat it in the middle. Then I drew the tipple, which is nothing but a two car length trestle over a ramp that dumps the ore into the awaiting hopper. We'll deliver the ore by Bachman's V shaped skip dump ore car. The tied track drawings are starting to get in the way, so we'll convert them to hidden trackage as both are socked away under the scenery. The top mine loop is under the rock of the mine face. The ore car track goes right to the edge of the layout and we'll put about four inches of mine tunnel and a portal there so a person can feel like they are in the mine looking out onto the mine complex. Neat, huh?

Bachman's V Dump Ore Car

The first thing I did was add the timber tunnel portals. These things are huge in On30, so be sure to make room for them. Timber portals are hard to come by in On30, but you can get them from Dr. Ben's website. These will work nicely and we'll need a ton of them. I also drew in the mine cribbing section and the trestle work to get the mine track over to the tipple. Looking good!

That's all for tonight. We'll pick it up from there on the next post. Meanwhile, use the comments section and let me know what you think!

Making the Grade

"Steep grades are a constant, uphill battle."
- Peppy

So I propped my foot up late today and started calculating the grades again. The ruling grade and the average grade for the layout are set at 2%. Basically that means this:

Grade % = Rise/Run

So, for every 1" of grade that I want over 100" of track will give me a 1% grade.
And, for every 1" of grade that I want over 50" of track will give me a 2% grade.

So if you know that you want a 2% grade, use this formula to figure out the run.

Rise / Grade % = Run

The design has afforded me a very long run as it winds around the mountains and makes maximum use of the loops, so keeping at 2% is easy even when one track needs to go over another. So I mapped out each 50" section of track and put in the grade markers.

I've started dressing up the header block a little bit and have added a scale and a legend. Grades are marked in inches from the zero point, which is the top of the open grid benchwork. The layout is actually a three hill layout with each blob being a hill and another hill at the bend. In between there is a canyon where exists the town of Mapimi.


So let's take a ride up the hill. We'll start at the smelter siding in East Mapimi. Heading east at zero elevation we'll go around the bottom loop to Mapimi and pass the town and the enginehouse. Once we pass the town, also at zero elevation we begin the climb. We keep an almost perfect 2% all the way to the station at Agua Caliente. This town is a high plain and grade-wise is perfectly flat. This is so we can leave trains and rolling stock here safely without them rolling to down visit the nice folks in Mapimi.

We then start another 2% climb as we round the Chihuahua Bend which now is 4" off the benchwork and has a nice view of the Chihuahua desert. We continue to climb another inch and then reach the first large bridge going over Mapimi and its valley. This bridge is on a grade.

On the grade to the big bridge it gets just a little bit steeper than 2%, but that is ok. I think I'll call it Durango Grade after the province where the mine is located. By the time we reach the suspension bridge we are eight inches off the benchwork. The suspension bridge is perfectly level at eight inches. We then end our trip at Ojeula which remains at eight inches.

In hind site, I'd like to have a little more clearance between Agua Caliente and the mine, so we may raise the mine to 8.5 inches. Agua is 3.5 inches and the mine will be 8.5 inches, which gives us five inches of clearance. A bit tight, but doable.
I like naming key features of the trackage becuase it makes operations a little easier. Instead of yelling at the dispatcher that you are on the left side of the layout, you can just tell them that you are on the Durango Grade.

I've got a few more track adjustments to make and then I'll input the grades into the CAD system and run a train over the layout. What fun!

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!