After a number of suggestions from a few people, I made some modifications to prevent… shall we say, undesirable operating conditions. Chief among the changes is a moderate sized passing track near the yard which will allow switching in the yard with fowling the main. Also, I swapped out a double crossover for a pair of individual ones, which will allow a train moving at moderate speeds to cross from any loop out to another without needing to make a “second pass”. Thanks to Chris Stilson on both of those accounts.
I looked at another suggestion made by Tremelle Sykes to move the yard inside of the outer loop. I’m still thinking that one over. On the one hand, having the mainline running closer to the edge would give a certain degree of…. asthetic? Perhaps? The downside though is that I don’t want to be reaching over a mainline with running trains to do manual uncoupling in the yard. I still have to think that part over more, so I may still try a variation on what Tremelle suggested. The other downside to doing that though is that it also means some of those yard leads would need to trim down a bit… so I’m thinking about it, but I’m not sure yet. At any rate, here’s R1 to my layout. Still a pair of 4 x 6 tables, so I think this might count as progress without a whole redesign.
Thanks to everyone who offered feedback and advice. I appreciate all of it, even if I can’t or don’t use it all in this layout.
