Finally...a track plan and some track laid

In the last post I described my pain in designing the track plan, as "Murphy law" has I showed a modeller friend my initial plan and he came up with some weaknesses with it.

With the Petersham station module track plan this will more or less stay as it is with a few minor changes. Although not a direct copy of the prototype it will have some of the features such as the shunting neck. On the other hand the 1970s module will require some changing  in order for the locomotives  to shunt effectively into the oil siding.

There is also a lot of real estate which has not been decided upon yet. Below is the draft track plan.

Another important milestone is that in the last two weekends I have started to lay track, adding point motors and wiring. So after 9 months of obtaining the Train Room, track is finally been laid, woo hoo!!.

 

 

 In the above picture is the planned "Petersham" station and goods yard with No:4827 doing a test run.

Here is another view from what will be the Crystal street bridge. There is still a bit of work to fine tune the wiring and also wiring the point motors which I will update in the next blog update.

Track Pain design

I have labelled this post as "Track Pain design" as this is one part of building a layout which I find overwhelming, filled with decisions and compromises. I needed somewhere to start and knew I wanted to model Petersham station area when trams previously run along Trafalgar Street.

 A first time visit to the ARHS Resource Centre at Redfern assisted me in determining what the goods yard looked like before the Training Centre was built.  The blokes there were very helpful but I stumped them by asking them for the dimensions for the North Strathfield "Ärnotts" underpass which they couldn't tell me on the day as I will be modelling something similar for the 1970s section of the layout.

After I left I received a call stating that they had found the information which meant another planned visit. 










From the visit, I discovered that the Petersham goods yard and the trackwork around the station had gone through various transformations over its time.

This made it difficult to determine how will I plan the track work for Petersham. Will I stick with the prototype with the exact era or if its  even possible considering how much space I have.

The left photo is how the track work looked before goods yard was extended all the way to Gordon street.



This photo shows how the goods yard looked in about 1937 and probably when the goods yard area was most extensively.

There was a turnback between the two local tracks on the station and a shunting neck heading towards Crystal street.

Also. only No#1 track had electrical overhead.

Based on this diagram it would not be possible to include all this so compromises and decisions will be made.

In the end, I was able to complete a design for the track plans for the layout .
This process took a few weeks:

• Testing with full size cut-outs of Peco points

• Q&A with my friendly model train shop regarding double and single slips
• A feeble attempt to learn and use "Anyrail" software to prepare a written diagram of the track plan.

Full details will be posted in the next update.