One More Change On The Lower Level

Greetings followers of the Atlantic Pacific Railroad and my blog! 

As many of you know, I'm working on a number of upgrades to the layout, most of it signal upgrades. Before I take the layout out of service, I wanted to make one more small, but functional change on the layout.

While running the layout one night, I had one of the Amtrak trains that I moved to the lower level by the Morris Plains Passenger Yard. It has 5 Amfleet cars and a pair of P42 engines on it. The problem was the train was longer than the siding and was fouling the switch. If I take the engines off the train, the passenger cars fit just fine. So, where do I move or send the engines? They could go to the engine terminal, but that would involve taking some other engines out of the engine terminal and off the railroad, which I really did not want to do. 

That's when it hit me! There's a track just to the left of the passenger yard where I leave an engine to be used in case a train stalls on the helix. Below is a photo of the engine and the track. You can see the nose of the engine and that track. Behind the engine is the yard lead to the passenger tracks...

Looking at the space in front, I saw I can add at least one track, maybe a second one for a total of 3 tracks. One would be for the large CSX engine, and the other 2 tracks would be for Amtrak or any passenger engines for the passenger trains. In addition, I would put a switcher to move the passenger cars in and out of the area. There's one more piece to the puzzle....

The last piece is how to make this work, or as others have said, how would it function during an operating session. The first thing I would need to do is to move the train around the bottom of the helix as it takes up just about the entire loop. It's my TTX train that I run for guests who want to see something cool and it has the 3 CSX 'Special Edition GE ES44AH GEVO' engines on them. I'll move that train to the last track against the wall in north staging. Currently it's holding 2 Amtrak trains. They will move back around the bottom of the helix (the Amtrak Superliner Train was originally around the bottom). 

This still leaves me room. The reason for the needed room? If the passenger train needs to run, you need to pull the passenger cars out and then add them to the engine(s). That's where the switcher comes in. Since the engines will be on the adjacent tracks, the engine can be moved to the Morris Plains station, have the passenger cars added, and then the train can head out.

Here's the area with the 2 additional tracks added, along with some engines that were on passenger trains now sitting in the yard..

This was a quick and easy change to make. Most important, it adds to my operating scenario for some passenger trains...

I can now get back to contorting my head in between the upper and lower levels and start installing the signals and eventually the new panel!!

Thanks for reading!!