Alright, got a new track plan drawn up as part of
my recent kick in the rear. I'm looking for any glaringly obvious errors that I might be missing, like inaccessible tracks, switches that seem backwards, etc.
It's 12' x 8'. 20" depth on the "bottom", 18" depth on the "side". It will one day be part of a larger layout, but this is what I'm going with now. Single-track main (inside track here is a passing siding). Turnouts are a mix of #5, #7, and #10 as appropriate -- #10 off the main, #7 off the ladder, mostly #5 elsewhere. Radius' are no less than 18".
It's difficult to balance the length of trains you'd like to run (desire is at least 6' eventually) with the yard space required to effectively work them. Even the below plan has a great deal of compromise and could really use a couple more and much longer tracks. But I didn't want to make the entire thing one gigantic block of a yard. And I brought the "bottom" 4 tracks out from the "top" 3 so that the tracks would tend to remain at least a little bit straighter rather than being almost entirely on a curve and used the space between them that was generated as a place to put a small crew office and a short track that could be used for railcar repair perhaps even fueling.
At the top left, what I have going on there is another byproduct of train length, and that is that I didn't particularly want the switch lead visibly going clean up the entire side of the layout into what will, some day, be a further expansion of the layout and could likely hold some other industry or at least some different scenic element. Having the switch crew pulling their cars clean around the layout I felt would detract from it, so I've hidden it which further reduces the width available for the mainline, but 12"+ is more than sufficient for a convincing portrayal of single track main. I'll have to find some way to convincingly hide the dissapearing track and subsequent disappearing/reappearing train without making it appear hokey, but I think that detraction is worth the alternative.
