Mocking up the Palmer Industrial Park

It's been a long time since I built anything in N scale - I've been in O scale for a number of years now.  I was concerned that although my plan for an N scale Palmer Industrial Park looked good on paper, I might be surprised when I built it.  Since the benchwork was already done (re-purposed from an aborted O scale plan) I decided to mock up the N scale plan full size in place.

Trans Plastics mockup

The above photo shows my mockup of the upper side of the trackplan (see below).  The black magic marker scribbles around the Trans Plastics tracks are where the paved area will be.  The mockup is quite crude - just sticks of flextrack laid over each other and the switches are merely implied.  Still, it's enough to get an impression of what the layout will look like.  The wood sticks to the right are where the backdrop will be.

I made the mockup by printing the track plan out full size.  The first step for a full size printout is to add grid lines to the cad drawing spaced closely enough to ensure that there is at least one grid intersection on each printed sheet so you can slide them all into the right positions.  Since I was going to print on legal (8.5x14) paper that meant mostly 1 foot intervals with some lines at 6" intervals.  Planning is key to get the lines in the right places.  Or alternatively you could just use a smaller grid (say 3 or 4" spacing) and not worry about exactly where the sheets fall.  I printed enough sheets to get all of the interesting track, but not necessarily the pure straight stretches - I connected those up with a ruler and pencil later on.  In order to keep from mixing the sheets up, I numbered each grid line on a small scale printout of the plan, and then number the corresponding grid lines on each full size sheet as it came off the printer.

The next problem is getting a full size version of the grid drawn on the benchwork.  The plywood on the peninsula has at least 2 prior O scale plan variations drawn on it in heavy pencil lines, so trying to add a grid on top of that seemed to leave a lot of room for confusion.  I have a 3 foot wide roll of paper left over from the days when I had access to a large format printer on a BYOP basis (bring your own paper).  The layout happens to be exactly 3 feet wide.  So I rolled out paper down the length of the layout and securely taped it down to give me a nice clean surface to draw the grid on.  I used a laser line projector to get a reference line down the 16 foot length of the layout, marked it at intervals, then used my longest straightedge to pencil it in.  A piece of string would have done just as well (and in fact that's what I've used in the past), but I am a bit of a gadget freak and a project that uses a laser is inherently cooler than a project that uses a string.  A carpenters square got me the cross lines on the grid.

The last step in getting the full sized plan was to number the full size grid the same way I numbered the small scale one.  Then carefully position and tape down each printed sheet.  It's hard to get a photo that shows the lines well.  This one is heavily tweaked to bring out the contrast.  The printed sheets are around the edges where the track is, near the center is the straight grid on the roll paper.  The heavy black teardrop in the center is a mockup of where the backdrop will be.

Mockup with printouts only

A single line representing track, even printed full size, still doesn't make it easy to get a sense of what the finished layout will look like.  To get a better idea, I used double stick tape to stick down flextrack along the lines.  I trimmed and used rail joiners to make the main track in the park runnable, but all the other tracks are just stuck down in the right place.  Making the main track operable let me test pulling and pushing 25 car cuts around the 16" radius end curve.  And it let me get a real sense for how long certain things would take, such as doing a runaround, then shoving to Maple Leaf at a scale 10 mph (the top speed permissible in the real Palmer Industrial Park).

Here's a few more photos of the mockup.  First is an end view taken from a similar angle as the black and white photo above.

End view

Next is a shot of the other side of the layout.  This shot shows the lead (nearest the edge), the runaround, the main track with 20 50 foot boxcars positioned between the clearance points for the runaround switches - the plastic pellet cars in the foreground would be sitting on the near switch - and the Quaboag track.  The two red cars at the far end of the Quaboag track are 75 foot center beams in the lumber unloading area.  You can make out the two Quaboag building mockups, although it's not easy since I used white paper and foam core for them they don't exactly stand out from the white paper on the layout surface.

Lead, runaround, and Quaboag

Finally here's a photo of the Maple Leaf Distribution mockup, again a little hard to see in the photo because everything is white.  The photo does give you a sense of the size of the building, which is about 46" long.  Should be very interesting to switch, especially if the second track isn't stuffed full.

Maple Leaf Distribution

I'm now much more confident that my plan will actually produce something that looks like I expect.

Current state of the layout is pretty much as shown.  I've boxed up and stored all the rolling stock, and unstuck and stored the track.  The next step is to cut out holes in the center of the paper where backdrop vertical supports will go.  And then carefully roll up the paper will all the little sheets still taped in the right places.  Once the backdrop supports are fastened to the plywood, I'll cut and position the 2" thick foam down each side, leaving just a little space to slip the backdrop in.  With the foam glued down, the tricky bit will be to roll the paper plan back out, dropping the holes down over the backdrop supports, and get it re-located properly and any errant sheets repositioned and secured.  A pounce wheel should make it easy to transfer the track center lines from the paper to the foam.  Once I'm sure that's right, the paper gets rolled up again (carefully, just in case), and I can go over the pounce wheel marks with a marker to make them more easily visible.  Then mount the backdrop, and lay track.  Sounds easy... but time will tell.

However, before I take the next steps on the N scale layout I'm taking the time to get the O scale layout running again.  You may have noticed stuff piled on it in the photos.  Those piles were on the future N scale layout before I started the mockup.  Now they need to be dealt with for real.  There's nothing like having a running railroad to keep the inspiration level up.