Our expansion retained the completed portion of the original board, predominantly the town area. (right side of picture below) the original two mainline loops were collapsed in a bent figure eight and thus had over and under grades. The expansion allowed us to open up the loops, expand the shay line to a full loop and remove the grades as well as much of the radiuses. This gave us much more room to work with and add to the layout.
Some have asked for layout plans and dimensions on the guest book...I'm almost too embarrassed to put his info here, but it worked for me so here go's.....
I'd like to say I was very high tech and had a cool 3-D layout CAD tool and spent hours and hours coming up with the perfect layout for our space available. The truth is closer to a quick note on a dinner napkin.
I've done CAD layouts before with some shareware stuff but I wasn't real happy with the results vs., the time put into the layout. I chose not to spend the money (or time) on the program and broke down and used a pencil and graph paper.
I really was only concerned about getting the radiuses correct. I wanted to be sure none were less than 22". Much of this was done directly on the layout table during it's construction. Here are some scans of my notes, but if you look closely (comparing to the layout picture) you'll see the actual layout, or track route, differs quite a bit from the sketches, but the radiuses are there. Not really much to work from but it did the trick for me.
Conceptual Sketch Layout Diagram
Dimensions on the layout photo
