Monday, June 4, 2012

Construction of a Dead Rail On30 Module

My fellow Dead Rail Society members (especially Justin) have been after me to build an On30 module.  The main requirement for the module is that it not have any track power - all the locomotives run on it will be battery powered.

Here is the track plan I chose.  the dimensions of the module were dictated by the size of my SUV with one of the seats folded down. That gave me 4 feet by 6.5 feet with a cutout to go around the seat left up.  This way I can transport 3 people.  I also wanted a module that I could operate in stand-alone mode.

The module consists of 2 towns, Sausalito and Duncan's Mills, roughly, following the North Pacific Coast as a prototype (to make it prototype based to keep Tony happy). All of the turnouts face in one direction so there is never any need for a runaround move. This saves a lot of turnouts and track.  The turnouts leading to Cazadero and San Anselmo are for connections to other modules.  San Anselmo doubles as a siding for an interchange in stand-alone operations.  Cazadero faces the wrong way and the siding is just a little too short for a car in any case.

Sausalito has a 2-track ferry that can hold 6 cars.  This acts as an off layout destination and as a fiddle yard for adding removing cars if desired.  The ferry won't actually leave.  It will stay docked.  The first track is the arrival/departure track.  Trains arrive and leave from here.  When making up a train to Duncan's Mills it will be assembled on this track.  The next track is a yard track for car storage. The back track consists of 3 industry spots.

Duncan's Mills has 3 tracks.  The challenge here is that the lead only has room for one car plus the locomotive. To switch it, the train is left on the arrival/departure track and shuffled one at a time in to the Duncan's Mills. Cars for the departing train have to be switched out one at a time. This will mean thinking ahead in order to get these cars positioned to be removed and not blocked by the arriving cars.

I am going to be using colored tabs for directing operations. This is a scheme used by John Allen on his famous Gorre and Daphetid and taught to me by Don Mitchell, a former G&D operator. I regularly operate on Don's Southern Mountain layout using tabs and have become impressed by the flexibility of the method and the endlessly varying patterns it produces. I think the latter feature will be important in keeping the operations on a small layout like this interesting. I will have more on using tabs in future posts.

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