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New Japanese Kato Unitrack layout


oeyhamre

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Hi folks!

I`m new to this forum, just got back into model railroading last year :). As I have no room for a permanent layout I decided to go for the Kato Unitrack system (and put my old Fleischmann Piccolo track back in storage). The only practical place for my layouts is the family dining table in our livingroom, so I only get to run a layout for a few days at best, before the need for the space in the daily running of the family gets pointed out  :icon_cheese:. (My dear wife  :love10:  is very tolerant and patient with her neerdy husbands rediscovered passion for modeltrains).

I have roamed around the forum a while and gotten a lot of inspiration and knowledge from all the great enthusiasts in here. I just wanted to show you my latest layout, this is based on Katos 303 layout, I`ve widened the curves to better run Shinkansen trains, and made a few other changes to utilize my track stock and my space:

 

No. 303 V3

 

I`m just awaiting delivery of some more track from Hobby Search to get this up and running. The hopefully I will have a few pictures in a few days (my shipment is currently going through customs, so hopefully the wait won`t be to long :)).

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You might want to move the double crossover to the right so that you can cross the tracks before and after leaving the sidings.

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Can't you better place it on the short straight section on the right just after the curve? That way you don't have to shorten your sidings.

But that makes me think: wasn't there a problem with S-curves and switches? Maybe someone else with more experience with Unitrack knows more about this.

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That actually was my original thought at the get go, but to get that to fit the table I will have to reduce the curve radius from my current 315 and 348 mm to 282 and 315 mm. I have only one long Shinkansen set now, but I plan to get more, and the 0 series I have struggle and don`t look good going through very tight curves.

Even so it might work in real life, so I`ll try the different options when I get to actually building the layout and report back  :).

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Update, I can`t get the layout to fit together in AnyRail with the tighter curves, so I guess it won`t work anyhow without changing the whole thing.

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seems no straights to fit a station/platform

He could make one of the yards a terminal...

 

I actually kinda like that idea, might use it on my own layout. Frees you up from having a big unbroken oval. And it's fun to do switching.

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He could make one of the yards a terminal...

 

I actually kinda like that idea, might use it on my own layout. Frees you up from having a big unbroken oval. And it's fun to do switching.

 

That`s the plan, the lower siding will be set up as a terminal station. And switching IS fun  :)

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Ok, that`s the tracks done for now. I decided to try to move the double crossover to the right like Densha suggested, and this promted a rethink of the sidings. So this is how it ended up looking:

 

P1163420

 

And in AnyRail:

 

No. 303 V4 2.0

 
The new placment of the double crossover works much better, good advice Densha  :).
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I'm working on a similarly-sized layout right now and my first plan was somewhat like this.  I found that having the station and the sidings both in the 'same direction' was unacceptable because you would have to stop and reverse a train to route it to a destination.  Stopping and reversing trains really reduced the fun of running them.  You might consider reversing the direction of the siding so it starts on the left of your drawing above.  Hopefully what I'm saying makes sense...

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Zartan.  The viaduct track starts shortly after where the sidings come off.  The siding cannot be turned around.  I think that with local train operations there will always be turning and backing up of trains.  If you have a large enough layout you can always build in turning loops, but with our size layouts, we don't have that option.  In Steam days we had turntables to turn locos, then there was run-around tracks, now we have Bi-Directional locos.

 

The layout that I PLAY with in our club is 20 feet long by 16 feet wide and we don't have space for turning loops.  They would be nice, but of very low priority.

 

gerryo

Edited by gerryo
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Yeah I gotcha, I'm not talking about turning loops though, just having spurs in both directions so a train can "come" from one direction "to" the other.  In this layout, trains departing from the spurs go into the layout counter-clockwise and there is no spur to go "to" if you are heading counterclockwise.

 

Totally hear you on the size constraints, I'm just making a suggestion/observation.

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Thanks for the suggestion. Sidings going both ways is something to try in the next layout, as gerryo points out, there just is no space to do that in this setup. The goal was to get as much fun and interest in a relatively small space, with a viaduct track, using as much of the track I already got as possible.

And I only have two complete Japanese trains at present (more to come, I'm sure :)) and they're both bidirectional:

 

P1163474

Kato 0 series Shinkansen

P1163472

Kato 113 Yokosuka

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Oeyhemre,

 

Great start! Wonderful to set up layouts like this on the fly and try ideas out and have fun. Hopefully you will get a spot to eventually keep things up for longer times. But if not at least your wife understands you and that's nice,

 

Jeff

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