More for the entertainment value than any realistic modeling approach, I made a scale graphic of what the actual CUT would look like in my train room.
The red lines around the border represent the walls of the train room portion of the basement. To scale the CUT map over the train room, I used the real distance along the length of Huron Rd. between the intersections of Superior Av and Ontario St. This is right around 2300' which is about 26.5' in HO scale. It just so happens that the wall along the bottom of the drawing is 27' from left wall to the doorway on the right side. If I was to build an HO scale model of Cleveland Union Terminal, it would take up my entire train room. Obviously that won't work.
The logical next step would be to figure out how to scale it down to realistic dimensions. My intent for the time being is to treat the CUT as a separate Layout Design Element (LDE) that will most likely get added to the layout further down the road. I do not want to try to tackle building CUT right off the bat.
Here is one rough draft of a possible track arrangement as an LDE. Rulings are 12". It uses 8 station tracks (upper 8 tracks) and 4 tracks for the coach yard. I think this track arrangement would definitely fit somewhere in the room and would still make a decent scaled down representation of CUT.
I may put in some stub tracks at the bottom of the coach yard for passenger car servicing facilities. The key to making this thing fit will be using curved turnouts and double slip switches. All of the turnouts above are #8 and the sharpest curve track is 40" radius. The longest station track is just over 8' long, so I may add another 1'-2' of length to this arrangement to allow a train of 8 cars of 85' length plus an A-B-A locomotive set. Right now this track group is right at 30" of depth which was one of my limits because of arm reach.The beauty of doing the design in AnyRail5 (or any similar model RR design software) is I can rotate and move the entire group of tracks around to see how it would fit elsewhere and see what I need to do to make it fit in a specific spot.
Jeff
The red lines around the border represent the walls of the train room portion of the basement. To scale the CUT map over the train room, I used the real distance along the length of Huron Rd. between the intersections of Superior Av and Ontario St. This is right around 2300' which is about 26.5' in HO scale. It just so happens that the wall along the bottom of the drawing is 27' from left wall to the doorway on the right side. If I was to build an HO scale model of Cleveland Union Terminal, it would take up my entire train room. Obviously that won't work.
The logical next step would be to figure out how to scale it down to realistic dimensions. My intent for the time being is to treat the CUT as a separate Layout Design Element (LDE) that will most likely get added to the layout further down the road. I do not want to try to tackle building CUT right off the bat.
Here is one rough draft of a possible track arrangement as an LDE. Rulings are 12". It uses 8 station tracks (upper 8 tracks) and 4 tracks for the coach yard. I think this track arrangement would definitely fit somewhere in the room and would still make a decent scaled down representation of CUT.
I may put in some stub tracks at the bottom of the coach yard for passenger car servicing facilities. The key to making this thing fit will be using curved turnouts and double slip switches. All of the turnouts above are #8 and the sharpest curve track is 40" radius. The longest station track is just over 8' long, so I may add another 1'-2' of length to this arrangement to allow a train of 8 cars of 85' length plus an A-B-A locomotive set. Right now this track group is right at 30" of depth which was one of my limits because of arm reach.The beauty of doing the design in AnyRail5 (or any similar model RR design software) is I can rotate and move the entire group of tracks around to see how it would fit elsewhere and see what I need to do to make it fit in a specific spot.
Jeff
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