More on the Port Costa-WC layout design

More on the Port Costa-WC layout design

The design is a modeling display layout rather than an operations oriented replication of freight and passenger movements. Track arrangements at Port Costa an Walnut Creek replicate condensed track plans of actual locations. Avon is a bit more fanciful.  

I operate strictly with DCC fitted locomotives. Trackwork will be a mix of Peco Code 83 and Code 70, Micro-Engineering and possibly others. I have a good stash of Peco Code 75 that will suffice until their Code 70 turnouts are available. Turnout control is another issue. I am used to just hand throwing Peco turnouts. I feel it mimics a brakeman's job on a real railroad.  I certainly have no plans to power turnouts and create a wiring nightmare. Manual push pull controls are probably an adequate solution for me.

I am probably going to add a friends suggestion of a cart fiddle yard/staging connection at the end of Walnut Creek to allow for longer length and by making it double allow for turning a 3 foot train segment. One could look at that as a truncated homage to the original purpose of Port Costa as the southern terminus of the SP car ferry that moved all mainline trains across the Carquinez strait until a bridge was completed in 1928.  The ferry pier tracks would have been located coming off the outside of the curve in the lower right corner. I will possibly do a John Allen style bridge and mirror where it is marked Martinez, Sac , ROW (Rest of World) in the upper left corner.

Note the 5 sections/modules and their dimensions. These form the requirements for the benchwork sections.  Benchwork is my agony. Trying to find a way to create the support structure for the layout at a one meter height that will allow copious under layout storage space.  It is my big hangup and problem of commitment to one solution or another.