I've been working with Railmodeller in H0 scale for a while now and have been pleased with its ease of use. I've used it to successfully plan my H0 scale modular layout using Fleischmann Profit track (pre-ballasted). Everything works well except for the curved switches which I do not use anyway.
I've just tried planning a layout in N Scale using Fleischmann Profi pre-ballasted N track and have run into a problem. After laying out tracks that align perfectly in H0 scale, the alignment is off in N scale as shown on the attached image.
Screen Shot 2020-10-07 at 3.10.00 PM.jpg (89.16 KiB) Viewed 1055 times
In this configuration the parallel tracks on bottom right should line up. It works fine in H0 scale but not in N scale. Can this be fixed? As I said, the track geometry works well in H0 scale.
We're using the track specifications as published by the manufacturers.
However, some manufacturers cheat when it comes to their track system and/or geometry examples. Unfortunately Fleischmann is particularly notorious in this regard. Due to flexible track connections this usually isn't noticed when assembling the physical tracks, however every small error shows up in the 'mathematically perfect' world of CAD track planning.
Depending on the situation you could manually adjust the position of tracks, insert tiny pieces of shortened sectional or flex tracks.
In the given example you might also start from the parallel curved tracks and insert the tracks at the known parallel track distance for the track system using the Parallel Tracks assistant and work your way 'backwards' to the turnout so you can be sure the parallel line starts with perfect alignment.
We're also working on adding functionality in the future to make track planning 'less perfect' to deal with situations like this.
Hope this helps,
Jan
RailModeller Pro - The model railroad layout design package for the Mac
