Laying parallel track

[The_Garbear]

Sorry if this is a dumb question/one that has been answered before, I did a bit of searching and came up with nothing. Winter break is coming up and most of my roommates are going home, which leaves me a couple of weeks of having my house mostly to myself and figured I'd try my hand at building a route. My goal here isn't super ambitious, what I have in mind is a short switching railway based out of Small Town, USA, partially based on a short line that connects where I live to some really small towns not far from here just to sort of get a feel for route building (and I feel we have a lack of Midwestern routes ). I've been working on it for a couple hours now and I've run into an issue already: I'm having an incredibly difficult time laying parallel track, like for example a railyard. I'm trying to build a siding to put a grain elevator on, and the methods I've attempted so far have been to start with the switch from the main and then leave it connected at just the one end because I can't make it line up properly, or I lay the second track in line with the mainline and then shift it to where I want it, but I can't make it connect to the main at either end. I shudder at the prospect of eventually constructing the yard I have planned.

Anybody have any tips?

[Bananarama]

The way I do it, and which others may use a different approach, is when coming to an area that I want to place a yard, is to lay multiple tracks across the area (along with the mainline), and then connect the sections via switches to form the yard. I then delete the unwanted track. A bit more info, including illustrated screens, can be found on my forum (start at the Prep Work section):

http://www.3dtrains.com/forums/index.ph ... lding-101/

[The_Garbear]

Cool. I'll definitely do some poking around there tomorrow if I have time.

[artimrj]

Cool. I'll definitely do some poking around there tomorrow if I have time.

I used Hack's guidelines on the NERW they work really nice that way.

[The_Garbear]

That's a fantastic tutorial. I'll definitely try to give this a shot over the weekend.

[barnez]

Also more-or-less as Hack suggests.

Also - if there is a "gap" such as a siding that isn't right alongside the mainline, I'll lay 3-tracks wide and delete the center track to keep everything aligned

-barnez