I have some time before I can begin construction of my new Ho Train Layout so I thought I might as well play around with a few designs and get it the way I want it. I have tried the pencil to paper routine but you just can't draw to scale correctly and things end up not fitting in real life. So I made the decision to find design software for this project.
I tooled around the Internet looking at a few different ones, mostly far more expensive then I wanted to pay for this service. I then came across http://www.anyrail.com/ . They have a great full featured demo with no time limit. I downloaded it and loved it. It has a few different track libraries but really who doesn't just use all flex track? The Atlas library has all their track including a flex. It takes a few minutes to get used to how to handle the curves with the flex but once you get it you will love it. The limitation to the demo is you can only have 50 piece of track on a layout...to get more you have to buy the software and I did. It was well worth it.
The best tip I have is once you get a section of track to where you like it, curve or straight, you can highlight the section(s) and copy and paste it around the layout. Then using their rotate tool just rotate into position so you really only have to make one 90 degree 30" radius section, one 25" radius etc, etc. and you can repeat all around your layout. Using the "cut flex here" tool you can then cut in transitions or straightaways.
Even though I ended up with a relatively basic main track design it was fitting the whole layout to the room while leaving the necessary open space that was the hard part.
I recommend this program highly.
