Hi All, first time posting here. I'm currently in the early stages of planning an automated layout using the tiny but awesome Z shorty series from Rokuhan. I love electronics, and am doing this as a deliberately difficult challenge, using Arduino's and a custom program to control it. I have a vision of a complete automated layout, using the Zshorty's to have many many trains running on a small enough board that can be stored easily. The plan is to have 2 tracks, an elevated shinkansen loop, and another slower loop for low speed stuff. The overall plan is to have an almost cartoon style and have everything shrunk down in a similar fashion to the shorty's themselves. Stage 1 attached below is my idea for the Shinkansen loop, with 3 stations on the layout, with 2 city terminus stations and a country intermediate station. The automation plan is to have trains travel from one terminus, take a few loops of the layout with an optional stop at the country station for some trains, then pull into the other end. I'm hoping this layout will allow quite a bit of movement to happen at once. I'm hoping that the experts here can point out anything stupidly wrong that I might of done with this layout, or ways to make the stations more interesting.
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Your trains will have no way to switch between inner and outer loops without going into and out of either yard in the lower corners. I would use one double crossover, in the loop, between the two yards, and one at the top between the sidings (which I would make longer, depending on how long you want your trains to be.) These would remove the need for the crossovers in each of the yards in the lower corners.
I'm wondering if those are double slips just ahead of the crossovers which would take care of the problem of moving between the two loops, but still think your suggestion on the placement of the double crossovers and longer sidings is a better approach, Sumner
Thanks for the feedback. I am thinking about using double-slips instead of the double-crossovers (mostly because they are cheaper!), but I also don't want to be doing any operations on the main loop either. I'd much prefer to have the trains 'set' before entering the main loop and going at almost the right speed. It might be nice to have them as back-up though, or for I will be extending the sidings out to have a good sided block between the loop and the crossover though, just to help keep things moving easier. The sidings themselves are long enough for the planned Z-shorties (the trains are only 150mm long) but I will likely hide some track under the building for when I can eventually afford some proper trains
It depends on whether you are modelling a double track main, or a single track main with a (long) siding. If you are modelling a double track main, then you will need substantially longer leads into your yards, to avoid "working on the main". Otherwise, if the inner loop track is the mainline, and the outer loop track is considered a siding, then you wouldn't need to work on the main.
