Laying it out

There are some huge differences between hand laying track and using the store brought items. In the old days one would just grab some points and flex track and just stick it down willy-nilly so that it looked like the plan you had sketched on the back of the fish and chip wrappers the night before.

With hand laying track its all different and there's something called planning which one must do. This involves firstly laying out the center lines of the track. with such a complex track layout I went with the easiest point to do which is the join between the 2 boards with the station building on it. I marked out the center line, then the station platform. The first line is marked out based on the loading gauge (checked with a Da) and the outside ones based on what I had premeasured in an old post.

OK, so I am cheating to use flexitrack to see if the curves are OK. I'm still trying to work out how to draw the curved bits in, but apparently it involves a tramel (which is not an East German car), and my first attempt to build one last night was a bit of a dud.

One thing that is becoming apparent very slowly is that I might not be able to fit in all the trackage that I want. Maybe if I had drawn an accurate plan in the first place.....