Revisions

Seems I'm following in John Allen's footsteps: making revisions as the layout is being built. The difference is he made them to suit future plans for a larger layout that were essentially a moving target; I'm making them so that my adaptation of his Gorre & Daphetid is more faithful. To be sure, the revisions are quite subtle; to the casual observer, in fact, the layout may not have appeared to change at all. But the revisions will have substantial impact nevertheless.

It was actually a number of issues that converged, which drove me to seek a solution. First, as I'd detailed previously, I was frustrated by the situation with the wooden truss bridges, and although readers made some good suggestions, I really had to get to the root of the problem to solve it properly. In addition, while posing the track on the subroadbed, I became concerned by the space—or lack thereof—for the Gorre station. And finally, I thought that the foreground space for the industries seemed cramped, even after changing the angle of the siding.

It's a good thing I hadn't received the switches yet, because I solved these problems all at once by tweaking the track plan. By changing the radius of the cut track highlighted in pink above (with the original alignment ghosted into the image), I was able to shift the rearmost foreground track toward the back of the layout by just a fraction of an inch; simultaneously, the switch connected to the new piece of cut track shifted to the right, which widened the space for the truss bridge center pier. I also slid the siding switch to the left just a tad to open up the space in front of the siding. It all meant having to re-cut several pieces of cut track, but that was the least of my concerns.

In order to verify the changes against reality, I made a 1:1 print of the revised plan, cut out the foreground portion, placed it on the layout over tracing paper, and traced the new track geometry. This resulted in a dizzying tangle of lines, so I re-traced the new ones with a Sharpie so they'd stand out. Then I re-cut the pieces that changed, and posed them all on the layout:

Of greatest significance, these new tweaks will allow me to build a reasonably faithful adaptation of the wooden truss bridges. Being a signature element of the original G&D, it was important for me to attempt to replicate it as best as possible; now I have a real chance of doing so. This experience stands as proof of a conviction I've held for a long time: a good plan should be able to sustain revisions; otherwise, it could fail—shattering like glass that can't bend.

Incidentally, this is the second round of revisions to the plan. The first were made to address the tight clearances at the plate girder bridge, and were likewise very subtle; they involved simply shortening some of the long straight runs of track by fractions of an inch. Consequently, between the two revisions, the number of cut track pieces dropped from 22 to 18. The plan, with cut pieces highlighted, now looks like this (the two darker lengths of track are flex for the bridges):

It's highly doubtful there will be any more changes, so one could safely consider the above as the final draft of the plan. Heck, a third of the track had already been laid...

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