RE: (erielack) The "ah-ha!" moment

["Tupaczewski, Paul R (Paul)" <paul.tupaczewski_@_alcatel-lucent.com>]

> Thanks Paul. In my N scale world I take careful planning to 
> make sure any "S" curve has a piece of straight track between 
> it that is at least as long as my longest piece of rolling 
> stock (crossovers for example). It is my understanding the 
> prototype railroads do the same thing whenever possible. 
> Maybe even more so now than during the EL era.


That's one of the reasons I pulled up the aerial of the "New Loop" - there's a nice big S-curve coming off the Boonton Line and heading south. And it looks like the tangent in the middle of the S-curve is a little longer than your standard 89' piggyback flat.

Replicating this in model form will be fun. In HO scale, I'll probably end up using a 24" curve for the loop. Yes, I can hear all the prototype modelers scraming at me - but the prototype crawled through this curve at 5 MPH and - as Bill Sheppard pointed out - had plenty of derailments and stringlining events - so really, if I have incidents running on my layout, it would be a perfect representation of the prototype!

That's another thing that's a bit odd - modelers try to perfect their trackwork so they never have derailments. Of course, that doesn't quite match up with the prototype - crappy track, plenty of derailments.

So I'm not going to sweat that. :)

	- Paul

	The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List
	http://EL-List.railfan.net/
	To Unsubscribe: http://Lists.Railfan.net/erielackunsub.html

------------------------------