Once I laid down the 1/2" sub layer of plywood for the yard area I decided to pencil in the track locations to verify that the design would work out in full scale. The yard area is not a big deal because it's basically three tracks running parallel to the wall. The only concern was if there would be enough space for the building flats between the yard and the wall. As it turns out there's plenty of room. The raised service track for the sand house and the coaling tower worked out fine as did the ash pit tracks.
The problem I ran into was with the turntable and roundhouse. The ash pit track is the return track for the turntable. The roundhouse is located on a bump-out perpendicular to that. I discovered that none of the roundhouse stall tracks were a clean 90 degrees to the ash pit track. Everything was off by 4 degrees. The reality of this is that it probably doesn't matter. Whether the turntable is operated manually or electronically it shouldn't have any affect. To my mind though one of the tracks should be perpendicular to the return track so that all the other tracks around the turntable can be placed evenly around it. I can't move the turntable and there's no easy way to move the yard. Shifting the roundhouse by 4 degrees makes the most sense. But here's the rub. The bump-out is just barely big enough for the roundhouse and cannot be moved because of space limitations in the room. Shifting the roundhouse 4 degrees moves it too close to the edge of the layout. Gotta think about this one.
The roundhouse is a Thomas Yorke design and came as a very basic kit with just plaster walls and instructions. I bought this about ten years ago and am just now getting around to building it. The original design calls for the rear wall to be 53" back from the center of the turntable. That's 30" between the edge of the turntable and the front wall of the roundhouse. That's a lot of real estate! There's no way that would fit in my plans for this small room so I modified the design by pulling the building forward so it was 12" back instead of 30". That's much better but it caused the rear walls to spread out more than the wall sections I had for back there. I was planning to pour new wall sections to make up for that but it would have required a lot of plaster carving.
Now I have the problem with the 4 degree offset and the building being too close to the edge. It finally dawned on me to use narrower stall doors and this will make the whole building narrower. With the original kit I would have had to make my own doors anyway so making them a little narrower isn't a big deal. Then I found some narrow doors from Grandt Line that would work. It made the entire roundhouse narrower by enough that I felt comfortable shifting it over the 4 degrees. As a bonus I can add one additional wall section to the rear wall and it spreads it out exactly the right amount.
So now I can set the third stall track exactly 90 degrees off the ash pit track. When I began drawing in the rest of the possible track positions around the turntable they came out to be centered exactly an inch apart, center to center, and gave me 40 possible track positions. Exactly. Everything kinda fell into place like magic. This is how it's supposed to be.
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