THE BIG LAYOUT

I know I have been talking about it for awhile now and here it is - the Big layout with every piece that I currently own used in the design.  It was quite a challenge so I thought that I would photo document the process so that you can see how the layout evolved and how I got to the final creation.  To start, I used the figure 8 with oval:

I decided to use the intersection here instead of a bridge through the middle so that I could use the bridges for other uses like going over the figure 8:

As I was thinking through the layout, I was debating between creating largely independent layouts on either side of the figure 8 and connecting them with a single lane or making it one fully integrated layout.  Eventually I decided to go with the fully integrated layout.  Now it was a matter  of figuring out where to go with that idea.  Originally I thought about two bridges running parallel to the current bridge, but that presented a few too many issues so I switched to a longer bridge running perpendicular to the current bridge.  The short bridge actually goes up two levels and the long bridge actually goes over the curves, back down and the up over the middle and under the short bridge:

I spent a lot of time deciding which way to take the curve on the right end of the bridge and eventually settled on the right turn instead of the left curve as shown above.  The next step was connecting  one end of the short bridge to one end of the long bridge.  I decided to work on the left side of the layout and originally went with a loop that splits, crosses itself and then came back together:

This eventually changed, but more on that later.  The next development was a bridge crossing over the oval and the long bridge (hence the reason I didn't leave it up across the entire length):

Originally I simply connected the right side of this bridge to the long bridge at the top of the above photo.  This left me with two simply loops on that side of the figure 8 and so I decided that I could one of my splits and switch it so that the loops actually interact with each other:

Much more interesting, don't you think.  At this point, it was time to move to the other side of the figure 8 and work that side.  I still had a pair of splits left and several bridges so there was some serious creativity required.  The first part was a track that looped over itself:

At this point, my creativity started to suffer as I had a huge amount of curves left and very few straight pieces, not to mention that last set of splits.  Eventually I did manage to make it work:

I still had a few ideas with the split and bridges going across other tracks.  Throw in a few chicanes to eat up some curves and we had a complete layout.  Due to the size, it was hard to capture the entire track in one photo, but here it is:

So there it is in all of it's large massive glory - what do you think?  Leave your comments below.