C&N Railroad Project - Pen to Paper...Again

So it was a little bit of back to the drawing board for the C&N mostly because during a sleepless night I realized that I was probably biting off way more than I could chew. While I love the thought of being able to fill a room with a railroad the fact that it would have to put up and taken down on a regular basis was a bit disheartening. I have been looking at a lot of different ways to build light weight benchwork with the storage thought mind and the different methods available tend to weigh to the expensive side as well.

Instead I was, once again, pulled back to one of the original plans that inspired me to get into model railroading back in 1974. And issue of Railroad Modeler (January 1974) featured a small HOn3 layout by John Olsen (at that time a very young John Olsen!). It, in turn, was inspired by a section of trackplan that appeared sometime in Model Railroader called the Sagatukett River RR. by Robert Silas it featured a railroad puzzle called Maximum Switching - Minimum Space ( I have a copy of this plan in a Kalmbach book titled: "Track Planning Ideas from Model Railroader, 58 track plans from past issues" published in 1981). While I'm not a huge fan of puzzles this one has always intrigued me and I took a stab at converting it to something that could work for the C&N.

In the original track plan the small town is called Equinox, on the C&N this will become Sunset. Point in fact the town of Sunset on the C&N did feature a wye with a station in the middle and a stream flowing under two legs of the wye. To orient, the leg on the top of the page would lead to Boulder, the leg to the left would go to Ward and to the right Eldora. Trains originate from Boulder, those going to Ward would take the left leg and pick up passengers on the east side of the station, those trains going to Eldora would take the right leg and back into the station as well, each facing in the appropriate direction. 

Like I mention this is my first stab at this. I have already started to redraw it because of the need to still use the 23x45" modules and a couple of the turnouts were falling directly across the module lines. I'm adding a passing siding, one because Sunset did have a passing siding on the north side of the station and two to make the puzzle a little easier to manage and a bit less frustrating to work. I would like my wife to continue her interest in model railroads after all.

On a side note I think I also found a location that could be used for my LA Warehouse district. Its still narrow but would be L-shaped with a 10' 5" long leg and a 5' 5" short leg. That would also be something fun to get up and running.

The first of what will probably be several drafts. I cut slips of paper to represent freight cars and engines to ensure that what I though might fit will really fit. The size on the #5 turnouts are based on the templates from Fast Tracks.