Winmar

My layout Winmar, based on a fictional location just north of Albury on the Main South line in New South Wales, should be delivered to our new home at the end of next week. The layout has been stored, among other things, inside a 40 foot container at Allied Pickfords. With the extremely hot weather of late, I am hoping the layout (and other things) will be ok since I am not sure if the container sits out in some open yard or whether the container is under cover in some sort of warehouse.

Anyway, I will take delivery of Winmar on Friday week and have it placed inside the garage for the time being. I am still of the mind to disassemble the layout, lift up the track, and remove most of the wiring to be used again on a new layout. I guess that the condition of the layout when it is unpacked from the container will also have a bearing on my final decision.

Notwithstanding the desire to start afresh, I still really like the layout diagram and the concept of running a branch and an industrial siding off the main body of the layout. Having a small loco depot (Winmar being a junction station) is also a plus.

Here is the layout diagram in original form (click on the image to expand it for viewing). I did make some changes to the arrangement of the track on the baseboard when I actually laid the track down. I made changes to the purple-coloured sidings behind the station, lengthening one of the double sidings and omitting the siding off to the left (still in purple). Also, S7 in the blue-grey colour was extended around as an inside curve and joins the main just short of the entrance to the traverser as a grains loop siding.


Perhaps I might consider taking out just the station "module" and seeing if I can use it within the body of the new layout, although at this stage it is not clear what the new layout will actually look like and nor what final area in the garage I will have to work in. I am also considering whether to use the twelve track traverser (the traverser moves on heavy duty rollers from a computer server stack) since this will be easy to unscrew and keep intact. Suffice to say, the original layout plan as shown in the diagram and with the traverser fiddle yard at the rear is very much likely to change in context ... or disappear all together.