2: What idiot thought putting a turnout here for the
B-side main staging area was good idea?
2
My organized self said cutting upper deck roadbed and building
joists would be a waste of time and I'd be better off finishing the
turnouts for the B-side main staging area or installing occupancy
detectors in the helix. My curious side said I'd need to cut those
pieces anyway, so let's see what it's really going to look like.
My curious side won. I also wondered whether putting Bear Creek
yard at a 53" elevation would work, and how high the backdrops
should be. A trip to a local big box store netted four sheets of ply-
wood and, with a bit of help from a friend or two, roadbed and
joists started to materialize. I used cardboard sheets used to sepa-
rate layers of toilet paper to mock up the backdrop (1).
Boy, am I glad that my curious side won! I knew when I developed
the trackplan for the B-side yard that the exit ladder would have
some turnouts a bit far from the aisle. But hey, with 17" of rail-
head separation between Bear Creek above and staging below, I
thought it would be OK. Wrong! Once visible in its final configura-
tion (2) it became obvious that those turnouts needed to be closer
to the aisle – a lot closer.
You can have too much staging!
Conventional wisdom says that it's not possible to have too much
staging for a layout. This isn't true. When the quest for more and
longer tracks results in inaccessible turnouts and tracks, you need
to ask if the end justifies the means. I'd sold out turnout accessi-
bility to increase the average length of my staging tracks by about
4'. Given that the shortest track in the redesigned staging area still
has room for a 25-car train, the answer should be obvious.
Unfortunately it wasn't obvious to me until I saw the staging cav-
ern under the upper deck with paper turnout templates in place.
Some looked awfully hard to reach! I'm really glad I figured this
out before spiking all those inaccessible turnouts in place! (3) (13)
Up the Creek Column - 2
3: The revised B-side staging area. Turnouts are now
much more accessible. See also (13).
3
MRH-Jul 2013
