I havea lot of space and and am looking at a freelance railroad. One of my goals is to be able to run 3 trains at the same time without a lot of “babysitting”. Am I better off to have one long run (about 175 feet of continuous track ) or create 2 seperate tracks within the space ? With one long run sooner or later a train will catch up to another or with 175 feet of length shouldn’t I worry much about it ? I have plenty of “inside” space to create spurs, sidings and a decent size yard so I can get plenty of operations if I desire as well.
Layout is HO.
I personally favor a walk around shelf layout with only one mainline along the shelf. (Few places have two railroad’s mainlines running parallel or near parallel, although it does exist.) If you want to mostly watch trains run, how about modeling a double track mainline. Then you’ll have two loops and still have a single scene on your shelf layout.
dentrainman: Are you talking about having 3 operators operate three trains at the same time, or being able to let 3 separate trains run around and around in circles with nobody actively operating them?
If the former, all you need is to use DCC control, and you can do it on any size of layout, as long as there are room for three trains.
If the latter, you’ll want three separate loops, because sooner or later they will catch up with each other.