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I am re-entering the hobby of model railroading after being out for 25 years.
I intend to use LibreCAD to draw track plans - a pretty lightweight use of a powerful tool, I know.
But my experience is that it is surprisingly easy to “paint yourself into a corner” just laying out track by eyeball - you get close to the ends, and realize you don’t have enough room for a reasonable minimum radius curve.
It’s also possible - if you are me - to layout a curve that looks tangential to a strait section of track, but really isn’t.
Either one of those can lead to reliability issues.
The classic advice is to layout the track and then experiment until the layout is reliable - but it seems to me that I should be able to get the geometry right with a tool that won’t let me accidentally “cheat” on tangents, etc. - and to create a design where the geometry is correct from the get go.
At least I think that’s possible.
My “daily driver” is a laptop running OpenBSD, so a lot of the more standard track layout tools aren’t available. LibreCAD is available.
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