More T-Trak Outside The Box

Harold Minkwitz, a blogger who's been talking about outside-the-box concepts like 5.5 mm scale for 3-foot narrow gauge on HO track, has posted on a new site about T-Trak. He says,

T-Trak is a great concept. It makes it possible to make a small scene that can be finished. I was building an On30 layout a while back and realized I wasn't a layout person. I needed a concept where the layout was more volatile. If I didn't like the section of the layout, that scene could be replaced. T-Track is great.

The basic idea behind T-Trak is small, manageable, standardized components. A limitation of the concept is how it's currently used, primarily for weekend "meets" in gyms, community centers, or convention facilities where numbers of participants bring modules to assemble large temporary layouts on tables.

Harold is raising the idea I like, how the small, manageable, standardized components can be used for home layout design, especially, as he puts it, for "rough draft" or "cut and paste" approaches. Here's another issue of how I think you can get more from T-Trak than the weekend meet idea allows.

I found this drawing of a simple T-Trak layout on the T-Trak site:

The basic layout is just three ovals, each of which could run a separate train. This is probably enough for a weekend meet. But what if you simply add Kato crossovers, or double crossovers, at the spots I marked? You've suddenly got a lot of options for different routes -- and this is prototypical in some transit operations, like the choice between the Main Line and the Suburban Line on the Metra Rock Island district. And of course, Kato makes Metra models.

The problem for the "weekend meet" based T-Trak standards is that the wiring standard of BWWB doesn't even allow you to use crossovers between the tracks! And DCC would clearly be the way to run multiple trains on multiple routes on such a layout, but "weekend meet" groups need to accommodate members who don't use DCC.

But at that point, you start to need a dispatcher to control the different trains on different routes. This is also getting too complicated for a temporary weekend setup. Eventually, I hope the idea of T-Trak for home use catches on.