Pine Valley Mockup Version 2

Here's a quick update that also explains last week's truly Wordless Wednesday with no photo description.

Months ago I originally made a partial mock up of the Pine Valley Yard in Dillonvale on the longest straight section of wall I have in the basement, a natural spot for a good sized yard. While this is a great setting for a mostly uncompressed version of the yard, over time I realized how much it impeded the flow of the rest of the layout design. It's location hindered the beginnings of the branches out of Adena(shown here), and prevented a easy to build solution for "off layout" staging without the use of loops or a crazy helix.

I moved the yard to the top section of a peninsula that had been originally planned for part of the Adena Branch and flipped it's location, giving a longer run. Then by compressing and trimming some tracks I was able to fit the yard into the space and was still able to keep it's main functions and many key scenes.

Keep in mind this is just a rough non functioning mock up, the engine terminal/turntable area needs major tweaking, a real train order signal by the yard office and the whole thing will be about 12" higher.

In all I'm pretty happy with this even though I had to make some painful compromises in the prototypical realism department. 

Soon I'll share the rest of the plan. 

Here's a few photos.

Main view of the yard, there will be a divider down the middle. The side with the orange tape measure is Dillonvale with it's freight house and the main continues to the right to Adena.

Looking east down the yard with a piece of foam now as the backdrop.

Engine terminal with some issues still to be worked out.

Pine Valley Yard Office. This is a foam core mock up I made a few evenings ago using blueprints I scanned at the CSU Special Collection Library. I do realize that no NKP S-2 Berkshires worked the W&LE District. Sadly, brass W&LE Berkshires are too rare to populate this layout.