Back from the Convention

Yes I’ve been back a week, but catching up with a lot of stuff at work as well as having to be out of town on business for part of the week has meant that I haven’t been able to update here as much as I wanted or will be able to do so in the future.

The NMRA convention was great, a number of interesting clinics, great layouts to visit and operate on.  I’ve picked up some good ideas that I want to look at including in my layout plan which will be posted soon.  I’ve been updating the Model Rail Cast forums with various details about the National Train Show, and will be dumping all of my photos there for everyone to view.

Other than that, I’m pretty close to meeting my timeline, I’ve got most of my thoughts on my layout design in my head, now I just need to get them down on paper, post them here, on the Model Rail Cast forums, as well as the LDSIG Wiki to get feedback from the plans and then start building.

Quick Update

Been a little too long since I’ve posted anything here so I figured I would give a quick update as to the status of my efforts.  I am still working on creating layout plans and operational schemes that I can get feedback on at the NMRA convention next week.

I’ve been starting with looking at the staging requirements for my layout under a couple various operation session plans

Plan 1 – 24 hour Operation Scheme
Plan 2 – 12 hour Operation Scheme, breaking the day into two segments
Plan 3 – 8 hour Operation Scheme

My overall goal is to create an operating session of approxiamelty 3 hours, so each of the plans would use a fast clock of some ratio.  There were a total of 18 scheduled Freight Trains (10 Westbound, 8 Eastbound) down the line during the time period which I am looking at, 9 of which made stops along the route.  And then there were the numerous local trains that transited parts of the line all adding up to a very busy stretch of railroad.