Japanese Station Help\Ideas

Hello.

We scrapped our original plans for our new layout about a week ago and are headed in a new direction.  As some of you know, we don't model a particular era, region, roadname, etc (steam runs with shinkansens with modern US freight with old German railbusses).

We are looking at incorporating one of the many Kato platforms and\or stations (we are planning on using kato superelevated double track).

Here's the questions: 

Would a station or platform be on the mainline or would it be on a separate line that reconnects to the mainline- on a siding as it were?

The stations that provide an overhead station or walk\bridge across the tracks to get to the 2nd track, would that cross a mainline?

Any thoughts or recommendations on using any of the kato stations or platforms?  Which ones?

Thanks

Would a station or platform be on the mainline or would it be on a separate line that reconnects to the mainline- on a siding as it were?

(speaking from a prototypical POV) It depends on the station.  Some have platforms on the sides, with through express tracks or freight bypass tracks, while others have platforms right on the main line.  Just build it according to your operational requirements and space/budget restrictions.  Any arrangement will likely have a prototype example, given the diversity of station layouts in Japan.

The stations that provide an overhead station or walk\bridge across the tracks to get to the 2nd track, would that cross a mainline?

Sure, that's the standard arrangement.

Fresh from my memories of Shinkansen style station...

At most Kodama's (local) stations only sidings have plaform with the two mainlines going uninteruppted in the middle.

At most Hikari's (limited express) stations, both sidings and mainlines share island platforms.

The non-shinkansen stations also have this configuration but there are always exceptions.

One thing to note is that ALL major stations have 2-4x the number of tracks as the mainline.

For instance, if your main is a single track then the passing siding will be located *at* the station with either an island platform or two side platforms. This is in contrast to the US where the siding is in the middle of nowhere and the station has one single-sided platform.

If your main is double track then minor/light stations will just be side platforms, but major stations might have as many as six or eight tracks serving 4-5 platforms.

If your main is triple track or above, local stations might be side or island platforms while major stations are an insanely complex set of overlapping tracks that would require a thousand dollars' worth of turnouts to model accurately.

Bill has some very good articles on this subject on his blog. This first is a nice general overview of small station arrangements, and then he has detailed discussions of some larger stations:

http://jtrains.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/japanese-train-stations-and-platforms/

http://jtrains.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/japanese-train-stations-utsube-line-hinaga-station/

http://jtrains.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/japanese-train-stations-seibu-tokorozawa-station/

http://jtrains.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/japanese-train-stations-seibu-higashi-murayama-station/

http://jtrains.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/japanese-train-stations-jr-tachikawa-station/

Those station diagrams are really useful. They'd be much easier to replicate with DCC, but since we're sticking with DC, at least there are some ideas for how to visually fake that kind of complexity.