Around the corner

[250×200 cm²]
① Mainline
② Loco spur
③ Industrial railway
④ Interchange tracks
⑤ Loading bay
⑥ Factory building
⑦ Overbridge
⑧ Cassettes

Most bookshelf layouts you see in model railway plan books are quite long. But that makes sense, because a relatively small layout of 2 m length could have 2 m long fiddle yards. This adds up to a overall length of 4 m. But when you have a small house it could be hard to find a plain wall of 4 m length outside the living room. The most obvious answer is work around the corner. The layout is split up into two legs of about 2 m long. And such a corner is much easier to find in your house. Anyhow, I’ve tried to make a layout for an inside corner. But the first problems you’ll encounter are about the pointwork. It’s hard to “bend” complex arrangement of turnouts into a 90° corner when using standard sectional track. Otherwise you’re forced to custom build the points, and that’s something I want to avoid for these plans. To complicate things further, I wanted to use smooth curves. One reason people build bookshelf layouts is the fact that ovals for small spaces need sharp curves and steep turnouts. That’s not very realistic. A straight bookshelf layout can do without them, but a corner layout faces the same challenges.

This plan tries to be an acceptable compromise. I’m using smooth curves and points. In this case the Roco-Line system from Roco↗. This plan has also another objective, namely modeling modern goods traffic. Most shunting layouts feed small industries with one or two cars at the time. Trains are combined or taken apart at interchange tracks and the cars are distributed. But modern transport rail doesn’t know this kind of traffic. It isn’t cost effective. Nowadays industries don’t get one or two cars, but complete trains. If you want less, you’re not serviced anymore. This is bad news for modelers, because complete trains take space and that’s just what small layout modelers are lacking. Change to a smaller scale or model a prototype of 50 years ago are the standard solutions, but I wanted to see what can be done.

This plan doesn’t depict industries anymore. The enormous scale of modern industries who need a complete train every day makes it impossible to model. So I’ve left that part out. What’s left are the interchange tracks. The mainline railway company supplies the cars and a private shunter takes them to the industrial area, which is outside the scope of the layout. The mainline railway comes from the front at point 1, the backside tracks belong to our private company at point ③. At point ② we find a loco spur for our mainline locomotives. At point ④ we find the interchange tracks. There isn’t a run-back possibility, so your mainline locomotives are locked up until the private shunter takes the cars away. If you want you can build a small traverser at the end of the interchange tracks to run your engines around. Staging is done with cassettes at point ⑧. Personally I prefer this system over a classic fiddle yard with turnouts or a traverser. The loco spur at point ② also leads into a cassette. This offers extra possiblities for changing engines.

The track at point ⑤ offers some additonal shunting possiblities and leads to the factory at point ⑥. This should be a tall building to hide the transition between scenery and background. The bridges at point ⑦ have the same purpose. The train length is limited to about 1 m. That isn’t much but I prefer short trains running over smooth pointwork over longer trains running over steep points. You can easily expand the length of the legs, but keep in mind that longer interchange tracks at point ⑤ also lead to larger cassettes at point ⑧.

The operational value isn’t large. It’s all more or less English style, where proportion is more important. But most English plans are modelling pre-war prototypes, this one is situated in our modern era. This layout models something of the emptieness of industrial areas. For most people these aren’t their favourite holiday spots, but I like the atmosphere.

↑ When you don’t like the cassette-system, I’ve drawn a variant with turnouts. Both the mainline and the private industrial line split into two seperate tracks. The storage capacity isn’t as large as with a cassette system, but could be sufficient for some kind of basic operation. Adding some extra centimeters at both legs would benefit this solution, because the maximum train length is reduced to 90 cm. The general idea I wanted to put forward is that it might be a solution to start fanning out for the fiddle yard in the visible area. Use medium radius turnouts for the (nearly) hidden tracks. This saves room in your fiddle yard.