In the January 2004 MR, Allen McClelland described his central staging and storage area. Typically, how are cars selected to come out of storage and be made into the train consists?
Different people use their yards in different ways. It really depends on a lot of things. Is the yard single or double ended? Is it easily accessable? Are you just parking trains, or are you making new ones? How big is your railroad? How many cars do you have?
I’m sure there are a lot of different ways to handle this concept. The main thing to remember is, that your railroad is connected to the “outside world”.
In my case, I located the yard under the main level of the layout. I can get at it if I need to, but don’t plan to switch cars there. Working in 3 rail O, my yard consists of 5 double ended tracks each almost 120 feet long. It is designed to operate in one direction. Each track can hold at least 5 trains in a queue. The plan is to operate this yard totally automatically. I’m not worried about the same train coming back during an operating session, because the yard is so large, and can hold so many trains.
In my case if I want to switch cars, the train can be routed to a yard on the layout, broken down and rebuilt into a new train, before traveling “off stage” for storage.
In the case of the V&O in the article, I suspect that the choice is based on the demand of the industries on the layout. Each industry needs empty cars to ship its product, and / or recieves loaded cars of raw materials. In addition there will be cars that just pass through the" V&O world".
Some sort of car forwarding system is being used to generate traffic, whether by hand or by computer program it is unclear. Every car on the railroad has to have a destination, even if that destination isn’t represented on the layout. Each car is represented by a card, which has all of the information about that car on it. Loads are usually represented by another smaller card, attached to the car’s card. It’s that load information that tells where the car needs to go. A stack of cards with loads makes up a train. The new train appears on the layout, and heads for the yard, where it
I don’t know specifically how Allen plans to work his staging, but it looks similar to how I did active staging and how Lee Nicholas works the “mole” at his place. Lee’s railroad is at:
http://www.ucwrr.com (Look for info on the mole under Staging/Operations/Paperwork.) There’s also a photo of my staging yard here:
http://www.wwvrailway.com/gbg4.htm
I worked it like this, and Lee does it almost the same way:
Every car had a car card with a waybill that “followed it around” to provide instructions for where the crew should send the car. When a train entered staging the mole operator removed the cars from the train, flipped the bills to the next side (I use 4-cycle waybills) and placed the cars on a shelf above the staging yard according to their next destination (i.e. all cars bound for “Reno” went together, etc.). Basically the waybills represent industry demand for empty cars as well as traffic moving between off-layout unmodeled destinations.
Each train had an instruction card telling the mole operator how to assemble it. It might say to build the train with a block of 5 Reno cars and 10 for the UP interchange at Salt Lake. The operator went to the shelves, found the appropriate cars, and built the train. The instructions would include contigency information, such as what to do if fewer than 10 UP cars were available, as well as information on what motive power to use.
Once the train is complete, the mole operator put together a train packet, containing the car cards for the train, a card showing the assigned throttle number, and the instructions for how to run that particular train (what it’s called, where it originates, stops, terminates, etc.). The packet
I use a 0-5-0 switcher [:D]
Yah, but I dare you to try that on an Atlas “O” articulated auto rack, 3 feet of train.
It requires a helper, two 0-5-0’s[:D] and then there’s the MTH 5 car spine set. That’s why my staging / storage yard is so large, its easier to keep them on the track. You HO guys can get away with all kinds of stuff. [:p]
My layout has several yards.One is a double end yard, two are stub end yards.There are also two large fiddle yards that are switched by an operator.The layout is point to point having two turntables and two wyes.I have approximately 400 cars stored in their individual boxes near the fiddle yards which are located in a different room.Cars enter and leave the layout in two different directions.While my layout may not be what many model railroaders would enjoy it must be obvious that I like to switch making up and breaking up trains.I use a card system and place the date on the storage box indicating when the car was last on the layout.That way visitors rarely see the same cars on the layout each time they visit.