LA Warehouse District - Track Plan Revision

A few ideas managed to emerge from the depths of my mind and I pulled out some more graph paper to make a couple of revisions to the track plan. The one thing that I have decided is that I'm going to invest in one of the track plan CAD just to be able to tinker with things a little easier. Something that will also allow me to design buildings, potentially to export to a laser cutter.

The first concept was how to include that signature scene of the curved buildings that I was losing. I reevaluated the room and decided that I could add another foot to one end of the layout if the cassette curved into the room rather than along the wall. The radius will be tight, down to 18" but the prototype is pretty tight too. So I'm good with that. I don't really need to model much of the building to get the affect but it is still a pretty small area to work with. What I might do is build something that will extend on to the cassette as well, something along the lines of Rice's jigsaw puzzle scenery pieces.

Adding a foot of space to the left was going to allow additional trackage to be installed as well. Industry Siding C will extend all the way back behind the freight building although I'm keeping the capacity at three cars. That, in turn, opened up space for a tad bit more track on the right side. I'm currently envisioning a freight house served from both sides  (now Industry Sidings B1 and B2) and still maintain and, in effect, lengthen Industry siding D to 4 cars. I have toyed with adding one more siding (tentatively Industry Siding E) that would sit more or less in the center of the backdrop. The issue here is that no matter what I do I would end up using another Industry Siding as a switching lead. For now I'll leave that siding off.

I'm a little stuck on scenery treatments as well. My first step was to create a scenery zone on the edges and the back. No track into this 3" zone along the backdrop but I might allow a some track to penetrate this zone on the left and right side as needed. I then sketched in a couple of the other building zones that would be working industries. A number of the sidings will end up behind other industries and thus "hidden" from view. I'm thinking removable structures with rare earth magnets for actually operating the layout. I'm considering three elevated roads, one on each end and one in the center to help break things up into separate scenes. Unfortunately elevated roads are not prototypical for LA it is, however, for Denver. Will have to mull that over since the Santa Fe didn't have any switching traffic in Denver.

Anyway just thoughts to mull over at this point.

I made some paper rulers representing 50' freight cars just to quickly see if I was leaving enough room. Here you can see two of the rulers and a portion of the South Yard Track, the North Yard Track and Industry Siding A.

Will it all fit? According to the rulers and the model it should.

And the whole reason for this version of the plan. Can I work in a curve and get my signature scene, or at least a portion of it, back?