Track Planning Give and Take
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… track planning? (Apologies to Tennyson.)
The bug hit—hard—last weekend to revisit my track plan. I then realized a similar urge hit me right around the same time last year. I’m not sure if track planning gets in my blood every Spring, but the timing did seem a little weird.
At any rate, this Spring’s tinkering began as I thought about structures (that is, how many kits I have and how few will actually fit, especially on the current sections of benchwork). That led to wondering what in my collection I might be able to employ in the remaining unplanned sections of the layout. And of course, you can’t do that without actually having a plan, so off I went.
I finished off last Spring’s track planning post lamenting that the decision to remove the peninsula left me with no solution for Wicomico St., Halethorpe, and Chessie’s Bayview Yard. At that time, I also made the bold claim that I would have solutions soon. Apparently “soon” is roughly equal to 13 months. But, I can report that I have answers for two out of the three.
Those two cases are Wicomico St. and Halethorpe. For both, editing was required to get things to fit in my available space; compromises were required.
For Wicomico St., I had to move Ellicott Engineering to the far end of the street, and I had to swap the order of all the industries. That is, the order that you encounter them is opposite to how you would on the prototype—with the exception of the Raleigh Industrial Center, and that’s only because it’s nowhere near where it should be relative to the other industries.
For a complete overview, you can view the old plan and the newest version of the plan. You can also always see the current track plan and the evolution on the Track Plan page.
On the Halethorpe side, the editing got significantly more brutal.
In the original plan I was able to include A&P SuperFresh’s three buildings, the freelanced Laura’s Own, and the Locust Industries warehouse. The National Bohemian brewery was previously located closer to Wicomico St, but it was always based on the Carling Brewery in Halethorpe (which in my era owned Natty Boh). There was also a reasonable facsimile of the sorting yard from the Halethorpe area.
In the new plan, all that I could fit without an overload of track was Laura’s Own and the brewery, although I was able to add some operating interest to the latter. I did manage a couple of stub-end tracks for sorting and was able to add a team track. In another major change, the industries will be served by Conrail rather than Chessie.
The result bears virtually no resemblance to the actual area. At the end of the day, I had to modify Halethorpe so much, a different name is probably needed.
The editing was worth it, though. I’m happy I was able to get a bunch of this operation back into the plan. It was Wicomico’s street running that sent me on this whole Chessie odyssey in the first place, and the new location for what was formerly Halethorpe gives Conrail a bunch more to do during operations. I had always felt it was pretty limited before.
What I still don’t have is a good solution for B&O staging. I’m still thinking it could be portable fiddle staging, but I’d prefer to find a staging scheme that would allow cars to “stay put” between sessions. I’ll have to keep noodling on that one.
With these changes, the major brush strokes of the track plan are complete. I’m sure I’ll tweak some more. Heck, I can’t even rule out more major changes as things evolve. But for now, I’m pretty happy with the plan.
The biggest drawback? That other bug. Which is the urge to build more benchwork before I complete the current sections. It’s something I previously said I wouldn’t do and then ended up doing (at least a little bit). So far with the new changes I’ve been able to resist the urge to add on. But they’re only a week old. Let’s see if I can stay strong…
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