Introduction

This Track Plan Sucks

Those who know me are familiar with my legendarily strong opinions, and it is thus that the only honest thing I could do would be to start off this book with one of them. Rest assured, you will see no shortage of those in the coming pages.

This track plan actually depicts the very first track plan I ever set about constructing. In an attempt to bring my O-27 Christmas train set off the floor and onto a table we already had, I found something resembling this on a large plan archive on the internet. My incompletely-motivated eight-year-old self never got around to affixing the track permanently to the table surface, but this is all for the better.

In looking at the plan, numerous flaws abound. There is no way to turn the trains, either as a whole or by reversing engines, save running around the whole loop. The track is way too close to the edges of the layout. The oval is tight. And, most notably, the whole layout is unforgivably boring. Sure, you could easily fill it with towns and mountains, award-winning models, no less; but that wouldn’t ever excuse the fact that, when the layout is completed, when it is all said and done for, you will only be able to run a train in circles and conduct very remedial switching in the tuning fork yard. Like running freights? Tough luck, there’s only one on-line industry. Well maybe you prefer passenger trains, surely that’s not as hard to do successfully on a small layout like this? Dead wrong, the layout goes from somewhere to nowhere else, and you’d be hard-pressed to think that the scale passengers would ever want to ride a train that returns them to their origin a few femptoseconds after departure.

Bluntly, you can’t do anything with this layout except build it. Once it’s built, it can offer you nothing more except as a background display piece that nobody will care for after a few minutes of looking at it.

Mind you, the faults in this layout lie not in that it is small, nor that it is simple. To the first, I have seen several basement-filling layouts (I would hesitate to call them empires) which are poorly designed for reasons similar or identical. To the second, it is equally as easy to overbuild a track plan as to underbuild it. Admittedly, though, this one does lie a tad below a threshold of having any substance to it.

Whatever your opinions or inclinations, I'm certain you’ve seen a track plan similar to this at least once before, and have thought that it is flawed in some way. What I am here to do is to teach you why, so that you can understand the principles of a good track plan and apply them to your own layout so that you don’t make a similar mistake.

The specifics of a faulty track plan

Let’s take another, more realistic example of a track plan, and analyze more critically to find out what doesn’t work. This particular plan is fairly ubiquitous in the hobby — I believe its original name was the Lake Mendota Central, or something to that effect — and it is most often presented as the canonical beginner’s layout; something simple, straightforward, and achievable. However, I would argue quite strongly that building a layout of this style would be a waste of effort. Let’s take a look at why.

Now, right off the bat, I do want to applaud this plan for doing a few things correctly, most notably its near-revolutionary kidney-bean shape. This is actually a very strong move to making a good layout because it decouples the track architecture from the side of the table. This serves not only to reduce the likelihood of inadvertent over-layout-side spillage, but it can make the layout look much, much more realistic by making it look like the train is curving through obstacles in a landscape that extends beyond the edge of the layout, rather than trying to maximize a run through a clearly artificial rectangular environment. While it may look a little weird in a plan form, all you have to do is build a reason for the railroad to turn around each corner (such as a hill, rock out cropping, or lake), and the final layout will look beautifully organic and effortlessly natural.

However, though this is an exceptionally good move on the part of the layout designers, that is pretty much where the aptitudes of this design end. The way that you can tell this is by running your eyes around the layout as if you were following a train and imagining how that train would go about its work. In the original concept of the plan, the pair of spurs served a single gravel plant, and that was the extent of the on-line industries. Now, imagine that you had finished building this layout, and you wanted to run trains. What would you be able to do? Well, you could pick up some loaded gravel cars at the mine and trade them for some empties. Then you could run around the layout a few times and stop at the town to do… nothing. You could maybe reverse your train on the siding, run back around a few more times, and use the siding to service the quarry again. And that’s, well, it. There’s nothing more that this layout could offer.

The greatest flaw in Plan 0.2 responsible for bringing about this calamity of inaction is that the layout does not acknowledge a world outside of itself. The trains don’t go from somewhere to somewhere else; they are permanently trapped in an orbit around whatever village is build in the middle of the tracks. If there was so much as a single additional spur that went into a tunnel or off the layout to a staging yard, this layout would be worlds different. The train could come from a far away yard onto the stage of the layout, winding its way down a lonely little branch line to this tiny town, whereby it would service the gravel mine, maybe leave a boxcar or flatcar on the siding as an impromptu team track, and then head back off to somewhere else in the wider world.

A staging or fiddle yard would allow you to vary the traffic that comes onto the line. Maybe the gravel mine had an equipment failure and needs to install a new machine? Never fear! The Lake Mendota Central has a flatcar with tarpaulin-wrapped machinery due in town tomorrow. What about the upcoming local pioneer days festival? Well, a boxcar of flour was just left on the siding as the train was leaving town to bake all the pioneer bread with. Oh? the railroad is running a rare mileage passenger charter to Lake Mendota tomorrow as an employee appreciation excursion? Thank goodness a neighboring railroad donated some restored passenger cars which will arrive in town this afternoon.

If there’s nowhere else to put all this equipment on the layout, it will stay behind the locomotive at all times, and this would destroy the illusion that the railroad is part of a larger world. You can’t really imagine the scenario of the gravel mine having an equipment failure and ordering a replacement machine if the tarpaulin-wrapped machine has been sitting behind the locomotive for weeks now. Ibid for the passenger cars. Physically manhandling the equipment onto the track every now and then when you want to change your scenario isn’t much better, as it could lead to accidental breakage of the equipment, and, even if not, it dulls setup times and makes it less easy to run a new scenario.But if there was off-layout staging, all of these problems are alleviated. Each scenario’s train can be made up ahead of time and deployed onto the layout.

This is the primary situation that I hope to avoid by writing this book. I believe it was John Armstrong whom once estimated that it takes 12 man-hours to build one square foot of layout. Thus, a four square foot layout, itself, exceeds the length of most modern Triple-A video game campaigns. Thus, when a small 4x8 layout is competing with the time it would take to complete almost ten full video games, you want to invest that time into something that will have an enjoyable payoff later down the line. Any layout as simple as Plan 0.2 does not have this payoff.

This book

All of the track plans you will herein see are original works by myself in RailModeller Pro, but nearly all of them are inspired or strongly influenced by actual track plans that I have seen in the wild. Most often, I’ve tweaked them to help make a point I’m arguing in the text. Wherever possible, I’ve modified the track plans to also avoid insulting the creators of the original track plans when I deride them; the only exception I am allowing myself is Plan 0.2 from this chapter, which is simply too ubiquitous in the hobby to ignore.

Part of what facilitates this book is my vast collection of track plans. I have long been obsessed with them, as they represent the infinite future potential of a layout unbuilt, and I love to imagine the layout coming to life by winding mental trains around the hypothetical layout. My very first action after my parents got me my first model railroader magazine subscription was to download every single track plan offered in MR’s track plan database, and, since then, my collection has continued to grow with MR’s new entries, plans I see elsewhere online, and pictures or scans of physical copies found in back issues of old magazines or books gleaned from the numerous libraries I frequent. My collection is now more than a thousand fold.

Having viewed and analyzed so many plans — in addition to the railroads I have (or have attempted) to build and the layouts I have so graciously been invited to operate on — has made me a very capable critic in the subject of track planning. Knowing so well what is successful and what isn't, it irks me to see so many beginner track plans falling prey to common errors, and it rattles me further still to see somebody invest so much time, effort, and hope on something that is designed to fail from the outset. It is thus that I thencely set about this book a-writing.

In the ensuing chapters (of which I have over thirty planned), I hope to explain the oft-misunderstood science of track planning. I will synthesize, modify, and improve track plans that I have come across to make powerful, enjoyable, buildable, cohesive, and refined track plans that, in addition to hopefully inspiring you, will direct you towards making a better model railroad.