Spruce St Track Plan v1.0

This has been a long time coming and is the result of hundreds of hours of research, trial and error, blood, sweat, and tears, but I finally have a workable track plan (at least I think I do) for the Spruce St engine and passenger car facility.

AnyRail 6 plan

3-D view of the same plan

This plan fits well within my available space and can be a fully operational layout as is, although the Spruce St engine and passenger car facility is just the first phase of the Columbus Union Station project. With the exception of the roundhouse area, reaching distances are well accessible assuming the plan is not up against a wall on one side.

The prototype Spruce St roundhouse had 31 stalls. My version has 30 because the Walthers roundhouse kits are 3 stalls each and the Walthers 110' turntable apparently works best with a 10 degree spread for each track. Am I really going to build a 30 stall roundhouse?  Probably not. That would be 10 Walthers roundhouse kits stitched together and would be a massive project. At around $45-$50 each, that would be almost $500 worth of roundhouse. To fully model the roundhouse would also present some reachability issues to the turntable. I will most likely end up having to take some artistic discretion and model a smaller roundhouse or cut some of it away ala Rick De Candido's Fillmore Avenue Roundhouse layout.

A unique aspect to this portion of the plan is the fact that the minimum curvature is 60" radius. That's right, there is not a single curve here less than 60" in radius. This will be a huge payoff operating 85' passenger cars and larger locomotives. After many hours of research on track laying both prototype and model, I have designed all turnouts to use a uniform 60" radius diverging route with a 10 degree minimum angle. What this does is create turnouts that will visually and operationally flow much better than a commercial turnout or even Fast Tracks templated turnouts. This will especially become apparent with pinwheel turnouts (each turnout placed on the curved side of the previous turnout), crossovers, and with turnouts placed at the end of a curve. A commercial #6 turnout has a closure radius of about 37" to 43" depending on manufacturer. Because of the included straight segments of the points and frog, a pinwheel ladder built with #6 turnouts will produce an irregular lead of approximately 60" radius. Cars flowing through this configuration will not appear as if they are in a natural curve and S curves with commercial #6 turnouts could cause problems with 85' passenger cars. Using the uniform 60" radius in all turnouts should in theory alleviate this problem.

The 60" radius curves give the trackwork a much better appearance

The reality of this will require all the turnouts to be handlaid in place without a template and could very well end up being a bridge too far for me. In the Army we used to spend hundreds of hours planning an operation but there is a saying that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy", which turns out in practice to be quite true. We will see.