With the "folded dogbone" eliminated from consideration, I took a look at some alternatives, starting with the "water wing" configuration. The following is an initial sketch to explore this configuration and it seemed promising:
After some thought, I was able to come up with the following design. As you can see, I was actually able to fit three stations into this design. I should note that the third station (on the straight section at the top of the layout) was really more in the nature of a what-if exploration. I was still thinking in terms of two stations, the main ones being on the ends of the two lobes. The two main stations are well separated and the passing loops are surprisingly long.
The problem with this design was that the stations could simply not accommodate more than one passing loop due to the curves involved. also, there were no good locations for storage sidings of reasonable length. My other concern was the S-curves at the entrance to the passing loops. In hindsight, I realize that I ought to have looked into the possibilities of using curved turnouts. In any case, this configuration just did not look right to me.
At this point, I decided to relax some of my requirements and explore more exotic configurations. I present a few of these below
None of them seemed to be very appealing. At this point, I decided to take a few days off from 3rd Planit and re-read John Armstrong's classic treatise on layout design.
As I shall explain in my next posting, this break turned out to be a good idea. and I was able to break my mental log jam.
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