Given this change I've been re-evaluating the overall flow of the shelves for my layout. I had last left off talking about the challenge of making sure the water faced the correct direction on the shelf. Re-arranging the modules gave me an L-shaped layout. When I started designing on this I realized there was enough room on the top to extend out another shelf line, making it somewhat of a U with a folded leg on it.
You can see from the above plan I had started putting place names and figuring out the general space things required. The track shown is 10.5mm gauge, HOn3. This was my first time designing for that scale/gauge. This particular configuration gave me 2 foot deep shelves and a mainline run of about 68 feet.
However as I was working on it, I began to wonder if this was the best use of space. In my track planning what it seemed I really needed was a long "run" with less depth for scenery and more overall "scale mileage".
Back to the drawing board, I figured out that if I shrunk the shelf depth to one-and-a-half foot I could configure the shelves/modules to have 2 peninsulas and go around the outer wall, giving me 88 total feet of mainline run. I'll need to do some more work with this shallower shelf to determine if it will be enough to accommodate the towns and scenes I'm planning, but so far it seems promising.
Here's a really rough-cut of what that layout might look like. Unlike the above drawing I haven't smoothed the layout area or backdrops at all (or planned for where the module breaks would be). The gray circle is 3 foot in diameter and what I'm using to determine the amount of walking/moving space a person would have with this configuration. The cost of a longer run is less aisle space, something which a lot of layout design experts warn to not skimp on.
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