Barcoola MKII mock up, Layout design considerations and the advantages of one to one mock ups

Hi All


Doug came around on Sunday, we made up a couple of mock ups for layouts.
These are both based around the current fiddle yard for Murray River Bridge and the foot print for the scenery boards is the same.  Thus about 2ft 6inches wide and 24ft long.
The first one was Barcoola MKIII.
While I am all for designing plans in 2D, there is really no substitute for setting up a layout mock up, in one to one.
The advantages are:

• you can see if what you have designed will really fit.
• you can check head shunts and loops for clearance and are fit for purpose, IE enough doom to effectively shunt.
• you can check for locations where access might be limited, amend as required.
• you can check your radi is correct and suitable for the rolling stock.

As a result of this exercise a couple of changes were made to the initial design.

Flipped it 180 degrees,.

I find that the yard trackage needs to be in the front of the layout, firstly for access, and it is visually more pleasing.  Having the mainline at the back of the layout means that the mainline trains can be the backdrop to the yard, the viewer gets to see more action.  Finally reaching over double stacks is never a good look.

Moved the locomotive depot.

Having sidings approach the mainline at different angles just looks bad and makes the layout look smaller, so the Depot was moved to the other side of the mainline.

Deleted the crossovers.
The TAR and CAR have two sets of crossovers at the western end of the yard, these were deleted as they were not needed, (the fiddle yard has a crossover) and this meant that the TAR Crossing loop could be extended to 18ft standing room.

Here is a video of the mock up.

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Enjoy...
Scott