On30 Portable (sort of) Layout

I have way to many hobbies and, obviously, I tend to jump back and forth a lot. While my main railroad focus is on the HO Scale Warehouse Row (D&RGW) switching layout. That moves slowly because the space where it will live is not ready, so I do a lot of research and planning. But I also have been contemplating an On30 layout and if you look back through the blog you will see a lot of reference to the On30 C&N railroad out of Boulder.

Original concepts have been for a switching layout based on the Sunset station area where the line from Boulder split, one to Ward and the other to Eldora. I have messed around with this a lot and I just can't quite solve how to work around the wye which is the major component of the area. Then the thought occurred to me that maybe I really needed to go in a different direction with this one, especially as the HO layout is a switching layout, do I really need two? The answer is yes, I need two layouts and no I don't need two switching layouts.

With that in mind I was thinking of something I could put up and take down without to much of an issue. 4x8 seemed a little small though even though, in theory, everything I own can handle 18" radius curves. The issue is more that everything else in O scale is just going to take more space. So I opted to stretch it to the space I could set it up in and it will be 4x10. 

This is very much a round the loop layout so there will be a lot more of just trains running than switching. So think of this one more as a display layout that I can just play with. 

Operationally it will work just fine but with the mining theme there won't be any intensive switching like there will be on Warehouse Row.

Layout design is not my forte by any means, so I went looking for designs that caught my eye. This design is mostly a stretched version of a design by Dave Meek (Thunder Mesa Studios) he called the Rio Lobo and Western Railroad (in HO Scale). It features four good sized bridges reminiscent of John Allen's original Gorre & Daphetid RR. and room for a little action moving cars around and, hopefully, room for plenty of scenery and buildings.

The turnouts are the Peco On30 ones. I took the template I downloaded from the Peco site and then reduced it down to the scale of my drawing. Hopefully I did that right. Its still pretty much a work in progress design wise. My intent is for it to break down into four sections for storage and lot of the elements will need to be removable because of that which will certainly increase the construction difficulty level, especially making sure that the track aligns properly between the sections.