Dakota Rails

This is the first iteration or concept of the track plan for the Dakota Rails layout as of December 2023. I suspect that this will change a little bit (or a lot) as I start building the layout, but I will keep all plans below to show the progression. What won't change is the shape of the layout. 

Below is the rough overview of the layout that I penciled out on paper. The room is 18'x39.5'.

I played around with a railroad CAD program called 3rd Planit and created the rough layout seen below. I say rough because I'll likely just be using this as a "guideline" for the layout as I will likely be laying track and creating the final layout "on the build/fly" so to speak as the benchwork is being assembled and installed. 

Here is a detailed area of the Ethanol Facility.

Here is a view of the Homestake Mine in Lead, SD that I will have on the layout in the peninsula area between the two hills. This will have one elevated track between the mine and the milling facility. I'm taking a lot of liberties with this one as the mine building and the milling facility were never in existence at the same time but then again there's a LOT of liberties being taken with this layout in general. The idea for this is to recreate the photo "3 trains over Lead". 

Finally I plan to have some staging lanes. Originally I was planning for them to be located under the peninsula as shown below. Part of the reasoning was that the trains could go down under the layout and actually "go" somewhere for awhile and then could travel through track until it finally comes up in another part of the layout via a helix under the peninsula. Upon more thought and recommendations from another club member, the staging lanes will now be in a completely different area with a return loop outside of the main layout room. This will allow me to "create" trains and switch them up while standing instead of leaning over underneath the layout which would be very inconvenient. I am still planning to have the trains run under the layout and disappear for awhile as though they are traveling from one location to another and then popping up via a small helix from the mountain on the peninsula. At any rate, here are the staging lanes as planned in December 2023. The only part of this that will be accurate now is the track to the lower level and a straight run to the helix to go back up to the main layout level.