St Paul Pass II - Level -1

The fun starts here - the lowest level will be at a height of 70cm (or slightly more than 2 ft). That's pretty low, but it's a storage level only. I hope I can use one rolling armchair at this height.

(1) is West Staging yard, complete with 18 tracks - just the same that it is now, except that it will get a second ladder. Today, it is one-ended only and that has proven to be a major headache. It costs precious time to rearrange the trains and it is not good for the locos to be handled every time.

(2) is a new storage yard for unit trains and unused cars, I hope that I can re-use Peco track from the old layout.

Between (1) and (3) is a long but straight ramp up to Level 0, which it reaches at (5), at which point the tracks will be 20 cm higher than before.

At (3) are the west switches of Plummer Junction, still hidden.

At (4) the Spokane-Marengo line splits from No.3 track and finds it's way to Level 0 separated from Plummer yard. This represents, as the name implies, the passenger line via Spokane and will only be used by passenger trains and the Metaline Falls Job and the Union Pacific's Wallace trains. All this - and the 2 yard tracks just visible near (5) will make Plummer Junction an interesting spot on the layout.

At (5) we've reached 90cm (approx. 3ft)  from the ground and the visible part of the layout.

I've changed a lot of my premisses of St Paul Pass I (StPP I):
First, the long hidden track I was to avoid at all cost on StPP I - I might be hiding a WebCam in there to help the engineers. What I've learned is: it is only important that hidden track is easily reachable, it's length is not important. I could have used a helix here but that would have gained me nothing.

Second, the orientation of the tracks: East is always to the right when facing the layout. There is no running against the direction and seeing the same scene twice, but from different directions.

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