The track plan for Le Mars is pretty simple. I constrained myself to reusing the existing IKEA Ivar shelves from my previous layout attempt as the benchwork for this layout. It’s basically an around-the-walls style with one peninsula.
Starting with the three track yard along the bottom, Americold Cold Storage will be represented along the backdrop. Moving south around the curve, we get to the Wells sugar facility, BoDeans flour, and the runaround track. Both the Wells and BoDeans buildings can be represented 1:1 based on this sketch, with some selective compression of the tracks. Around the end of the peninsula is the rail-served warehouse. Finally, at the far south end of the line are the transload tracks and IML Containers. All tracks are represented in this plan, except that the liquid transload has four track on the prototype but only two here.
Going north from the three track yard is a short lead to represent the CN connection. The operating plan does not anticipate ever running any CN trains on this line. Instead, the yard will act as a staging yard between sessions, and a real yard during operating sessions.
The track curving off the CN connection is an option for adding the one thing missing from this prototype that was on my original givens list – a grain elevator. By putting an elevator here, I can scratch that itch without compromising the prototype fidelity of the rest of the layout. There is an elevator in town served by the CN (and this is Iowa!), so having one in the area is totally plausible. But by placing the elevator on its own little peninsula, it’s out of the way and I also have the option of making that section a module (or modules) and doing any number of different things there.