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}