HO Scale 5x9 Table-Top - Need Ideas - Model Railroader Magazine

hi OP and Powhatten fan'

The plans by Pcarrell are drawn with RTS. And you can count the tracks. Every time an other piece of track is used you see a white dot.

In the lower two designs the outer track has a 22"radius, four pieces are needed for a 90 degree turn. The inner track uses only three pieces and has a 18" radius; you can see a lot of double dots here, witch means the designer used very short pieces of straights in between to create something that appears to be a 19.5 inch "radius". The upper pike uses 24"and 22" radii and has some space left at the outside.

Along the main he used #4 switches, in the yard #6's. A strange choice. A #4 switch is about 8 inch long a #6 will take almost a foot.

All pikes are lacking staging. After a while you get tired seeing the very same trains appearing every three seconds. To create some time and space to do a bit of switching it would be nice to have tracks were a train can be parked temporarily. So we are back into the footprint debate. Finding a way now, how to add staging , is easyer then doing it after the build.

All pikes are a bit track heavy imho; so I would leave the turntable out. The tracks coming from the TT are very short, so are the roundhouse tracks. And you can't use the whole length of these tracks, due to clearence problems. The steamers or other engines using the TT will be restricted in length to 6 or maybe 7 inches. The engine escape track at the very end of the yard has the same "length", a lot of other spurs too. (Pcarrall must have missed Christopher's first remark he wanted to run modern diesels)

The best part is the interchange track in the lower right corner; this track should be kept at all times.

pcarrell

no grades on the layout so the trackwork would be easier for a beginner.

The trackwork will be the same, it is the benchwork that is more complicated.

Seems to me some tinkering with the plan is still to be done. The best thing you can do is to post a drawing of the space you have, like Andy Sperandeo did in 102 Realistic Track Plans. This will make it possible to think about a footprint with staging.

SteinJr had a great plan for a 5x9 in another thread, you can ask him to give you a copy.

Paul