Nicely thought out

Looks nicely thought out and fun to switch.

I might be stating the obvious.. but I presume you will extend the lead coming from the oil refinery.. is that to be extended to "the rest of the railroad" or lengthened in some way? I can't see how you would switch the refinery. If that is where you plan to use the casette staging I would think it would make switching in there unreliable to use the cassette as the lead..

Anyway.. nicely drawn, good job!

Chris

Two things

Your plan as drawn is missing two things

1) as pointed out above the tail track for the refinery is waaaay to short. Switching the refinery is either impossible (if the tail track is only long enough to hold a loco) or will be excrutiatingly painful as cars have to be shuffled in and out one at a time.

2) you have both facing and trailing point spurs but there's no runaround track to permit getting the engine on the right end of the train to shove cars into the spur.  The prototype could deal with this by using two engines or more frequently by using the momentum of full-sized cars to kick cars into a spur. However kicking cars doesn't work very well in models because our cars a) don't have much momentum,b) don't uncouple well while in motion, and c) don't have brakes to gently slow them to a stop at the right spot by a crew man riding the cars.

Suggestions:

Your refinery complex doesn't show much of the refinery. Are there too many tracks to allow modeling much refinery? Perhaps eliminating a track or two would yield a bit more space and allow making the tail track longer.

Adding a run around track between the refinery and the yard would make it easier to switch the refinery. One track could hold the cars heading for the refinery. The other trackis available to hold cars leaving the refinery.

As an alternative the refinery could be flipped top to bottom so there is no longer a need for the switching lead at the bottom.

You will need a run around somewhere to spot/pull cars at the Agway Systems Warehouse.

Keep on working on the plan, this could be a very nice one!

Cheers,

Charlie

And Charlie is correct . . .

I do need a lead for the refinery to switch.  I haven't drawn one on here because I am not sure how it will look.  If you look at the plan, and the pictures from my previous posts, you willsee that the refinery section is tucked back into an alcove in the room.  At the southern end of the plan (remember top is north) on the refinery side, there is a wall that runs even with the aisle endge of my benchwork.  I can add a short 14'radius trun to that, and either build a cassette staging area, or perhaps a really scaled down versionf o the KCS Baton Rouge Yard.  But, for now, I'm going to concentrate on the becnhwork and track for the other parts.

I'm also looking to add a run-around when I lengthen the yard leads for the UTLX facility.

Most typical beginner track planning boo-boo

The lack of runaround tracks is a very common beginning track planner boo-boo. It reflects a lack of operating experience - because once you've operated a few times on some other layouts and done switching, you realize runaround tracks are ESSENTIAL to being able to switch well.

Now, there's always exceptions, of course - for example there's Lance Mindheim's Florida East Rail layout, but then all the spurs are facing point, with no trailing point spurs - so even then, the switcher can come onto the layout on the back side of the cars and then switch all the spurs. But mixing trailing and facing point spurs on one layout means a runaround track is essential.