On second thought . . .

Sunday afternoon I had the chance to actually measure the new basement. I wasn't surprised that the actual dimensions with the walls framed out had changed somewhat from the estimates the builder had given us a few weeks ago. The revised floorplan can be found in the link just below the header. 
This task meant I spent about 45 minutes in the basement, and during that time I couldn't help but feeling that the "branchline" scheme I've discussed - a layout inspired by the CV's Richford Branch - would be a much better fit for the space than going through the process of attempting to fit, and refit, several of the mainline towns into the space. I think the resulting layout would always seem just a little too cramped. 
But just because its a branch doesn't mean the curves won't be fairly broad. 
And note I said "inspired by" - the goal here is not a tie for tie duplicate - a good thing since I simply have no idea what some of the buildings actually looked like. If I can determine what they looked like I'll model them accurately. Otherwise, I'm going to draw inspiration from other places along the CV to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge. 
Things are starting to come into focus.