I've used XTrkCAD to produce a fairly thorough plan for the mechanical parts of the railway. I've also used it partly to create an electrical plan, but it is less good at that.

XTrkCAD supports the concept of layers: this allows the design to be built up in sections with only certain kinds of detail visible in each. For any given purpose you can then choose which layers to show and which to hide.

There are a lot of different ways that the layer feature can be used but what I've done is to use it to plan:

  1. Room outlines;
  2. Main baseboard woodwork;
  3. Upper level baseboard woodwork
  4. "Main" track loop, fiddle yard and Petersfield station;
  5. Eastleigh depot;
  6. Clanfield station;
  7. Portsmouth Station;
  8. Signals on "main" line;
  9. Signals on upper levels;
  10. Wiring on "main" line;
  11. Wiring on Upper levels;
  12. Location of electronics.

The best way to view the design is to print some selected views:

{phocadownload view=file|id=2|target=s}

{phocadownload view=file|id=1|target=s}

The complete CAD design file is here: {phocadownload view=file|id=11|target=s}

Using This Site

Searching

The web site can be searched: type a search term (e.g. "DAC10") into the search box on the right hand side of the header, and hit enter. the search engine will find words matching the search string in the main body of the site, but it won't search attached documents (e.g. the product manuals).

"Read More"

Many articles are displayed one after the other. some are quite short, and say "read more" at the bottom. Click that to read the remainder of the article.