Its gonna be up against three walls. I have considered moving the staging are to the front which should help with the long distance reach.
I would suggest starting over from scratch. I don't think your plan can be salvaged by a minor change like moving the three staging tracks to the lower edge.
Maintenance will be a nightmare, with the access issues. You crawl or duck walk under a couple of feet of layout hauling tools, pop up into a narrow slit, try to reach across a long reach, discover that you need another tool, do a limbo thing to get down under the layout again, and crawl or duck walk out to get the other tool.
Apart from the access issues, the track plan itself is pretty boring, and has very little variety in what you can do.
This looks like a typical display track plan. I assume you were thinking of standing at the bottom of the plan, looking at one train looping around and around and around on the twice-around loop.
The train will pass through the same scene over and over and over again - sometimes in the foreground, sometimes further back, most of the time
many feet away from where you will standing.
Visually, it won't look anything like a railroad, where the trains come from e.g. the east, go past where you are standing and then continue towards the west. It will look like you are standing on a high point in an amusement park, watching a ride loop here and there and then return back to the same point it came from.
The design ideal these days is to have what is called "sincere scenes" - i.e. scenes that the train pass through once, in one direction.
Having an alternate path (or a siding) with the 22" radius curves doesn't do much for the plan - it essentially works as a fourth place to stash a train while one trains loops around on the mainline. Not much point in letting a train on the siding leave that siding while another train is looping - there isn't anywhere else two trains can meet.
You will need to be religious about throwing turnouts from a distance - if you forget to re-line the turnouts for the mainline after leaving the staging, you will derail at speed next time you try to pass this point while looping.
If you take the inner branch/siding/whatever, you again have a fair chance of derailing when you get to the far end, unless you either really watch what you are doing, or wire the turnouts on both ends to change at the same time. Do it wrong, and a running train plows into a train standing on the siding.
Can of course be helped by wiring the track so that it is controlled by the position of the turnout, so trains approaching a turnout thrown the other way will be stopped.
Mind you - forgetting to line turnouts is a common occurrence on model railroads - it is not unique to this design. Happens on any plan that has at least one turnout
What makes it more aggravating in this plan is that most of the time derailments will occur far from the operator.
Most people seeing it will probably ooh and ah about how big it is, watch a single train loop for maybe one or two minutes, and then bore of watching the train loop, and want to walk on and do something else.
Kids might stay interested for 15-20 minutes, maybe even a couple of hours, pressing buttons to select the inner loop or not, and maybe trying to figure out how to get two trains running at the same time, crashing into each other.
After a couple of days or weeks of this, they will get bored and will want to do something else.
And that's about it.
If your plan was to duck/crawl into the narrow pit to operate from there, you would at least get some visual separation of scenes (you cannot see what is behind you), but you have a pit too narrow for even one person - forget about taking people in there to watch your layout.
But operations won't be any more interesting - it consists of looping around and around.
There isn't much in this plan to keep an owner/operator interested for a long time - this is the kind of layout you build, run for a little while, and then tear down again to build something else. Or build, run for a while, and then abandon to let it gather dust, since it is so hard to maintain it (due to the access problems).
In my experience, many people starting out tend to be too concerned with
quantity of run - wanting twice-around and alternate paths, and not concerned enough with
quality of run.
I would suggest starting with a list of what you want your trains to be able to do. And then one can look at how to fit that into a room your size.
Narrower shelves around the room with a far larger pit in the center is likely to produce a layout that will look better and be more interesting to run. Or a walk-in design, with turn back curves on wider blobs at the ends.
But the first step is coming up with a list of what you want to do with your trains. Do you want to have trains meet each other? Do you want to walk along with a train going along the track? Do you want to watch a scene where a train arrives, do something with it's cars, and then depart?
What is your core vision?
Passenger trains? Freight trains? Old fashioned steam trains? Small diesel switchers with a handful of cars? Long trains of containers or coal cars? Logging? Mining? Modern suburban industrial parks? Northwest corridor passenger trains speeding by?
Small town on the prairie with grain elevators? Desert landscapes? Trains running along winding rivers in Appalachian valleys between tree covered ridges? Tracks in the street, winding among warehouses in Brooklyn?
It might also be a good idea to mention what scale you are considering modeling in. Going N scale instead of H0 will give you a lot more options for how to fit a layout into a given space, since N scale can make do with
far smaller return curves - which has a
major impact on how to fit a layout into a room.
Hope I haven't stepped too hard on your toes. I am not trying to be mean - I am just trying to make you think about what you want from your layout.
Smile,
Stein
