Paper Layout

With some professional deadlines met, I had some time recently to get back to the China Basin project.  My challenge was to create a plan which would fit into my rather compact car.  This meant breaking up the design into sections no wider than 36", and 2'x3' would be best:

As soon as I had a design that I liked, it was time to print out a full-scale version to check things out:

One of the best things that doing a full size printout gets you is that you can "play test" using equipment and check to see if the track work will actually fit.  Part of the learning process was understanding how the CAD package representation of a switch played out with the actual FastTracks turnout templates I was planning on using— the photo below shows pretty clearly that I'm best sticking with very tightly trimmed #6 switches (I had hoped to "goose" #7 turnouts instead):

Another discovery of this experiment was that the fouling point of each yard track needed to be about 1" in from where the track became parallel.

The finalization realization was the need to construct 40+ #6 turnouts.  I'm telling myself I GET to build them.