I miss the one page switching challenge that used to be in MR years ago. Anyone know when the last one was done and when it started?
That goes back awhile. I don’t remember it ever being a regular feature. Just sort of a now and again usually in the back of the magazine or as a sidebar.
Good luck
Paul
Same here, although I liked doing those whenever I ran across them. I don’t think they were a regular thing.
John
I think those puzzles was 1 every year or two.
MR would do well to return to some items like that along with bringing back several of their dropped columns.
IIRC they were usually the work of Bob Hayden and involved his Carrabasset and Dead River HOn30 railroad.
-George
At least one of them, which had a very unlikely track plan, was based on a sliding block puzzle.
Many of them involved track patterns which were, to put it kindly, more model than prototype.
I recall one where the main complication was set by inability to use a main through track for working out the puzzle. One working railroader answered with something to the effect that the crew would pull into town, go to beans, then, after about as much time as the ‘approved’ solution needed, the conductor would call the DS and request clearance. Once obtained, they would handle the whole works in a half-dozen moves and get out of town in plenty of time to arrive at the next siding before their clearance expired.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I’m not sure when the switching puzzles ended but I do remember seeing them in MR issues from the late 70’s. It seems they appeared every couple of months. Every so often when I’m down at the California State Railroad Library (Sacramento) I’ll come across one of these when I’m looking at a old issue of MR.
Jeff B
I hated those things. They were no way to “run a railroad.” My solutions were to add/change track so the railroad “works.”
Mark
Sounds like we have some budding Captain Kirks here…
The one I remember was a narrow gauge railroad called Carrabassett and something. The puzzles were a little artificial, but were fun to solve, the rules were simple and involved getting the switching done in the shortest number of moves.
Oops, someone already said that.
No, I picture myself as Alexander the Great “untying” Gordian’s knot by cutting it with a sword.
It’s kind of funny you mentioned the switching challenges, I was looking through a box of old MR magazines I bought at a train sale about 2 montha ago, and I saw some of those puzzles, and was immidiately hooked. While I couldn’t figure most of them out, I enjoyed lookong at them, and I have high hopes of using some of them as parts of my layout’s trackplan, and placing photocopies of those pages on a clipboard my friends use to sort out the operating session’s paperwork. If anyone get’s an idea from this post, I will try to have this as a discussion topic, so look back soon.
Ahhh, Switching Challenges!
Love 'em.
Take a look at: http://www.RRpuzzles.com
Does Inglenook and Timesaver.
It would be great to find a list (index?) of all those old MR puzzles.
Didn’t MR used to publish an overall index every year?
Go to the Railroad Magazine Index on this site
Search on the word “puzzle” as a keyword
For Model Railroader magazine, you’ll get this list
As others have stated, for the most part these are not anything like real railroading. Personally, I never understood the fascination with them.
Cuyama,
Great help - thanks a bunch!.
I’ll be spending a lot of time at the library reading/copying back issues.
I understand the “not anything like real railroading” point, but each to his own.
I find trying to figure out the best (fewest moves) way to solve a switching problem quite interesting.
I would submit in that “real railroads” have to do this all the time, it is prototypical in that regard.
- Alan