Exchange

I spent Sunday designing the rail way lines for my station layout. As I stated in a previous blog entry, the layout was inspired by the hauptbahnhof in Köln. The platforms are situated in the left section. The center section will house the switching and the right section will contain a bridge crossing over the river. The center section took me quite a bit of time to work out. I went through many versions before settling on this one. At one point I had five electric double slip switches and twelve turn outs amounting to over $500. That didn't even include the solenoids or all the single track! Cringe. Here I thought the rolling stock was the expensive part of this hobby. Hoo boy was I wrong. Overall I'm pretty happy with the results and managed to optimize the equipment down to only 14 turn outs and zero double slip switches. In looking at Bachmann, Atlas and a few other manufacturers, I decided to go with Minitrix due to the quality. It's more expensive, but worth it in the long run.