Flipping It

I've been playing around with my layout designs and thought I'd have a go at flipping some of them around to develop new possibilities. The idea is to use the same track components and baseboard area, but to open up some alternative themes for the track plan, either by rotating them or by inverting them in MS Paint.

This is one of the results, which uses my yard track template flipped in mirror image. It's part inspired by Chris Nevard's compact iron stone quarry layout but primarily by the quarry sidings at my local granite quarry in Cornwall. This featured a concrete 1940's gravel and stone silo, with sidings leading off from the Callington Branch at Hingston Down. 

The layout of the buildings isn't thought through at the moment but there would be a similar silo over one of the sidings, probably the single siding at the front, with a possible second loading area under the main screening plant at the back, although that is more likely as a simple storage siding. The backscene would be modelled as quarry walls, with the quarry itself behind.

I might also add a small loco shed for the quarry 0-4-0 and a dummy spur of track leading off into the quarry from the first point on the right. This could also be used as a fiddle yard if I extended the head shunt at the right hand end, instead of having a fiddle yard on the left hand end of the layout. I'd need to widen the baseboard to 2' and extend it's length to 6' to do this but it would be feasible.

I've always wanted to model a quarry, so this might be a good plan, although the wharf layout would work equally well, even without flipping it round? The theme would be 1950's early British Railways steam but with scope to push it back in time to the 1940s with late GWR locomotives and rolling stock. There would obviously be mineral wagons or hoppers but also gunpowder vans, flat wagons and so on. Why not?