The track plan

I experimented a lot on my laptop in RailModeler.

The first concepts were for HO, and I tried mightily to squeeze in everything I wanted:


But when I made the leap to returning to N gauge, things got a lot easier.

The first N concept was a huge, hollow oval with a swingable Tenbridge section for access, and a branchline intertwined along one side. I never liked the idea of the bridge/gate, however. Too easy to damage, and just too much of a pain to negotiate over and over again. I made several track plans based on this and it just never fired me up:


So I moved to a dogbone with a branchline coming off on a parallel peninsula:


After some tweaking and rearranging to maximize scale distances, ease of access and realism, I finally came up with a dogbone about 22 feet long, with a blob on either end. Off of one blob extends a long peninsula, paralleling the length of the dogbone and making the whole layout into a kind of deep, skinny walk-in U. This is what I am building:

The NS-CTC interchange yard is located at the middle of the dogbone, just "south" of the Tennessee River, where the north and southbound tracks are necked close together to cross a four-foot-long, double-track Tenbridge. Yes, this fictional yard is is on the other side of Tenbridge from where the CTC branches off.

But I sort of like that. In real life, you see, the industries in North Chattanooga are served by trains put together in Chattanooga's DeButts Yard. On the other side of Tenbridge. Real-life traffic to the branch crosses Tenbridge, too. I'll just be using a little interchange yard instead of NS' DeButts Yard, which is, er, a little out of my league to model!

So the CTC train leaves the interchange yard, crosses Tenbridge on the main line as the great blue herons go flapping and squawking away, and veers off the main line on the other side to head for Red Bank. (I'll post a bigger, better track plan later.)

Now, this is where the long peninsula at the bottom of the diagram comes into play. The branchline goes down the whole length of it, serving a few industries and passing through Red Bank, then curves around the tip to travel down the whole other side. The peninsula is divided down the middle by a view block.

The strips of usable real estate on either side are not huge -- about 17 inches wide -- but in N scale that gives room for a lot of industrial activity. The branch serves riverside industries in this final stretch, and terminates, as it does in real life, at Signal Mountain Cement.

But what does this region look like in real life, anyway? Not very much like my abbreviated version. That's the subject of the next entry.