Getting the Track down!

It’s been great to see the track go down and I’m really excited about this layout. At the same time, in a strange way, I am also really keen and anxious to get things right and not to get over excited and do things in the wrong order. If this layout is going to work in an exhibition environment, it needs to work, it needs to be robust and it needs to be reliable.

I have laid pretty much all of the track now and fixed some of the buffer stops in place. I have not fixed the relatively cheap Peco buffer stops in tbe passenger arival lines as I want the platform lines to have something much more realistic for these lines.

I was really excited to get the third siding laid, this runs behind or in front of the signalbox. This will be a coal yard reaching the end of its life. It will be used occasionally to store wagons, departmental stock or even engines awaiting their next task. As indicated in an earlier post, I had a coal depot on my earlier layout and really loved the lines that were nearly hidden in the earth with the buried sleepers.

I have had a dilema with this track plan. I know that most trains run on the left side of two tracks assuming they are not bi-directional. If I had run both tracks into the station, the line closest to the front would be able to run trains into the goods yard and into the bay platform but the track does not access the main platform face at the back. The line to the back is able to access all the tracks in the station but would really only be the line out. Given this situation, I had to decide if I was going to create a fictitious narative where there is a swap over line further up or should I create a head shunt from the other line and have a natrrative where the second line in and out of the station has been pulled up during a track rationalisation exercise and the line has been stopped before the bridge to form a head shunt. I’m still not totally sure yet which narrative to follow which explains why I haven’t fixed a buffer stop down yet. if you have any thoughts, send me a comment and tell me what you think I should do.