For several years I have been looking at building a model railroad. I looked at many published plans. I drew up custom plans myself using different software to draw them up and see what would fit my available space. I have used different software such as cadrail, 3rd planit, xtracad, anyrail, and scarm, all at different times over the years. I ended up settling on 3rd planit. During the outbreak of Covid-19 in the beginning of 2020 I was laid off from work. I had a lot of free time on my hands and used that time to polish up some 3rd planit skills a little and make a final drawing for the chosen plan. The chosen plan is the Delaware Avenue Branch which was in model railroader; I believe it was March 2017's magazine. The plan is also in MR's track planning database on their website. It took me probably a good month or more to get the plan drawn out in 3rd planit the way I wanted it. I increased its area size from 9' x 12' to 13' x 17'. My scale in this case is going to be HO. Based on the original size I was not able to get switches to fit the plan in its original configuration, that is why the dimensions changed. My approach to building this plan was to 1. Get the area cleaned up where the layout would occupy. 2. Get benchwork built. 3. The plan would use hand laid switches...in this case Fast Tracks hand laid switches. The rail used is Atlas code 83 rail on everything. Now that I knew what I wanted to build I had a few needs and questions to be answered so I could start working. One of the questions concerned building Fast Tracks switches with Atlas rail. Tim Warris was extremely helpful with the answers I needed. Basically Atlas code 83 rail fits Fast Tracks code 100 fixtures. Since the base of the rail on Atlas track is the same on both code 100 and 83 I can build switches with both sizes of rail in the same fixtures.
To Be Continued....
