(Track) Planning for General Motors

I previously talked about the layout of the General Motors plant and how I thought it would easily translate to a track plan. And for the most part, it did.

At right is my original track plan covering the area in and around GM, including Penn Mary Yard and the Canton RR interchange. If you compare it to the roadmap, you can see that the track plan bears a pretty close resemblance to the shape and contours of—even if it has far fewer tracks than—the prototype. (I did manage to include all four autorack loading tracks.)

And as we discussed, my tracks are also a lot shorter out of sheer necessity. But I believe there’s enough length there to provide reasonable entertainment for an op session.

This is the plan that I actually built out, as you can see at the right. (I then changed it, but that’s a story for another day.) You can see the as-built version of this track plan in action if you watch the video in my “First Run” post.

The plan also give you an idea the shapes of the buildings I initially planned to put there. (Which was part of the impetus for the change, but again, I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Below is the track plan including track labels for GM and other descriptors. The track names at GM do not match the track names from the roadmap, by the way. And they’ve subsequently been changed, to boot. (Yes, yes, it’s part of that “another day” thing again. You’ll just have to stay tuned.)