Tight curves

In my last post, I showed the Nantahala & Smoky Mountain Gorge track plan as a possible basis for the railroad shortline that I'd have in the Grizzly Mountains. I've also got this image of one of the original Gorre & Daphetid track plans (which was actually originally smaller than 4x8 feet). I'll likely flip this both horizontally and vertically, and this is a possible alternative as well.

Neither of these two has a reverse loop. I'm not thrilled with that, because I like the ability to turn trains around without picking them and turning them around manually, but I don't have a lot of potential to do that unless I can squeeze a turntable in there somewhere. In a pinch, if I add a wye-like junction, like there is between the J&SW and BA&W track plans, which I'm also replicating, then I can have trains pull into the BA&W, then back up the other branch of the wye to change direction, of course. It's a bit awkward, but probably better than any other alternative if I need to turn trains around. Maybe I'm overthinking the desire to turn trains around, though. I just don't like trains backing up for long periods, although I do recognize that in real life that did happen a fair bit. But if I'm just trying too hard to add a reverse loop at all cost, that's probably not going to be a great fit either. So I'm also considering the other two Gorre & Daphetid track plans that have a turntable on them. Again, flipped or rotated, possibly.

I should note that the two with a turntable are really the same plan, just slightly redrawn in one case by Linn Westcott to show smoother curves. Given that it's less a schematic and more of just a drawing of the plan, that's fine. 

Again, I know that this isn't the "conventional wisdom" of how to do track plans. One 4x8 is considered bad enough by many in the know, but two connected by a 2x6 or 2x8 bridge is ridiculous. It's also not a great utilization of space, although if you've got a bit shed or barn or something to build it in, then that doesn't really matter. If when it comes time to actually build the Ruritanian Territorial Railroad Commission's two railroads, the Jefferson & Lamar Mountains RR and the ... whatever I call the Grizzly Mountains railroad (I'll need to rename the towns Gorre & Daphetid, if I do indeed use one of those plans) and name the railroad based on those towns, I may not find that my plan is actually feasible. I do need to be able to get behind the railroad to reach it, which is the disadvantage of the 4x8s. There's not really a front or a back; you kind of have to be able to get to all of it. John Olsen made it look like he built a 4x8 that was like a "real" serious railroad, but I'm confident that he couldn't possibly have done so unless his backdrops, at least, were removable so he could get to stuff in the back of the railroad from time to time.

So ideally, that's what I'd do; I'd need at least a good 20x20 foot space to build this in comfortably, and the railroad itself would be 8 feet "tall" from a top down view, and 14 feet wide. But with aisles behind the backdrops, and removable backdrops, I can get to all sides. I can also have removable backdrops that can be reposed if needed to facilitate photography or videography of the layout from any angle, which I like. Although John Olsen seems to hint that that's not what he does; he talks about this railroad as if he just built it and runs it like a normal person, in the other book that I have, A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos, it's clear that his photography is a very involved process that consists of moving all kinds of elements around and posing them specifically for the shot, not necessarily for permanent set-up on the railroad.

In any case, one thing about the 4x8 style railroad is that it is difficult to have curves that are less tight than 18". This is usually fine for the types of locomotives and rolling stock that are on 4x8 foot railroads, although many modelers prefer the bigger locos and bigger cars, so they need more gentle curves (and therefore not 4x8 railroads.) They also prefer the more gentle curves because they believe that they have a greater since of fidelity to the scale of the prototype. 

This is exactly the kind of spergy detail that makes the hobby considerably less fun for most normal people, though. Besides, I think one of the main points at creating the illusion is scale, i.e., you need to scale things down, not replicate them "to scale." A normal sized (to scale) train or building usually looks really big on a model railroad, because model railroads are inherently not to scale. They have to fit in a single room, usually, so they are a scale mile or two long at most. You create the illusion of scale in part by having small elements. Smaller buildings. Small trains, with small equipment. John Olsen understood this pretty intuitively, as did Malcolm Furlow, which is why they deliberately had small stuff. Furlow even went to narrow gauge to make it even smaller, but Olsen used small buildings, often little more than shacks, and small trains; a Heisler was one of this biggest ones, and rarely pulled more than 4-5 cars at a time. If this is a bridge too far for people who have grown up worrying about scale in the wrong way, it's deliberately explainable on my railroad plan; if it's a shortline frontier railroad that is deliberately supposed to have smaller, cheaper locomotives, small mixed trains doing LCL type runs, and even carrying a combine passenger/baggage/mail on most trains, etc. My biggest locos would be stuff like a 2-6-0 camelback or a 4-4-0 Modern.

If I rotate this so that the left edge is on the "top", then I can have the long spur at the bottom curve off the board and connect to the BA&W analog, and that's how I connect. Big mountains would be along the top (left) edge in particular, with Daphetid being a lumber camp rather than a town. If I can divide via scenic blocks of some kind the Gorre area from the turntable area, and they can be two towns, potentially. I'm looking at the bottom of the three right now). If I do the bottom, I don't need that many tracks coming off of the turntable. Two or three max is fine, and more like the San Juan Central paradigm, actually. A big trestle or bridge around the corner at the bottom right would be cool, climbing via steep cliffs to big mountains at the top right and along the entire top edge. That same edge would just be a gigantic cliff below the track level, and then up much higher than it too.