Model Railroading > Dinning Room Table Top Test Track, in N scale

I made the mistake that too many people make planning a model railway. I made a plan that was too big to build, too expensive to pay for and too restrictive to have fun. I made up the plan, ran it in my head and quietly let it fade away losing interest before it was built, luckily. Last year after going to New Zealand I even considered selling everything off but I didn't. I told this to my friends who meet on Wednesday nights at the start of a meet one night and after I saw them use shoe boxes to simulate an operating session I remembered the most important part of model railroading, it's supposed to be fun! By the end of the meet I was back and knew I had to come up with a better plan! I scrapped my plan for a single prototype railway and instead decided that fictitious terminal railway where any railway goes was what I liked the most. I came up with a much better and realistic plan as far as actually building it in this lifetime. I ran the trains in my head and found more operating opportunities as the months passed adding to and mainly subtracting from the track plan but making it better. I finally thought about how small a radius I could get by with as one track will have to have a small radius to make the layout work. I am restricted to only five foot out as the layout will be in the room thing that I walk through to my bedroom in the upstairs of my house, I don't want to bash my feet on the layout at night. I attempted to make a test track with KATO but instead traded all my KATO UniTrack for flextrack. I then put down outdated bus schedules on a 1/2 inch foam piece, drew out a centerline and pushed track nails through the flextrack to make a 13" radius S curve. I then put various cars together and pulled them through. Most stuff worked to my surprise. I also took out two Tunnel Motors to see if they could make the radius. Unfortunately I found that a short covered hopper will not stay coupled to a long flat car. Oh well better to find out now instead of after basing the finished layout off of this radius. Next will be to pull out the nails, redraw a slightly larger radius and do the whole test process all over again, repeating until I find the sweet spot.

1) These two GTW boxcars are about as close coupling as it gets. They do make it around the 13" radius.
2) What Tunnel Motors look like on 13" radius.
3) Uh Oh! The long flat cars will couple to each other and go around no problem, but wont work with short cars. 

The good news is I finally figured out what to do with my Southern Pacific 70 tonner as seen in the last photo. It will be the switcher for the big grain elevator.
http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?3,2854794,2854794#msg-2854794
It only took four and a half years to figure out how to use it properly but I am glad I held onto the little unit.

Thank you for looking!

Jim

---

---

---

Not to disparage the TO page but there's some interesting Layout discussions on 'Railwire' dot net. The format is very different than here, much more technical when needed, often opinionated, more photos and can also be much less fomal, but also more goofy at times. Most of the work is in N-scale, very impressive Layouts and also some shelf switching layouts, modules and the odd single turnout projects. Not always material for publication, or for TO, but seems to be more encouraging and similar to the informal group, it seems to have it's own niche:

https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?board=20.0