I am laying track today in my HO scale yard. I would like to know how far apart do I need to lay the track? My yard is small, maybe enough for about 18 cars.
Regardless of the number of cars, length of the tracks or number of tracks you need enough room to be able to grab one of the cars from the top for uncoupling and rerailing purposes. In HO I wouldn’t go any closer than 2 1/2".
Hey mike, check this out.
Tips about yard design.
- Don’t try to cram a lot of tracks into a small space. Why? If the tracks are close together and a car derails and goes over, ever heard of the domino effect?
- Give yourself at least one staging track and have it connected to the main at both ends. Two would be better. This gives you plenty of area to make up and break up trains.
- Don’t make spur tracks that are going to trap your locomotive behind a line of cars. Always have an escape route.
- And most important, Don’t try to make a complex design. The more complex a design, the more things can go wrong because of a simple mistake.
Simplicity of design is simplicity of operation. I’m in the hobby to have fun running trains, not trying to find my way out of a rubics cube switchyard.
SP specified 18 feet center to center, the new requirements are around 24 feet center to center I believe, these new requirements caused SP to pull up a lot of older yards rather then allocate funds for expensive upgrades…
dave
Space tracks far enough apart to allow you to pick up a car w/o disturbing whatever car or structure is next to the car being picked up. You could put two tracks closer together and leave additional room on their outer side for vehicles such as trucks for loading and unloading freight cars. By the way, with the rains here in NY, it’s a good track laying day. Household chores will have to wait until the sun is back out.
Layout some flextrack and place cars on them. See what works best to rerail a car on the middle track.
Bob >
If one is going to be operating the layout using a car forwarding system, then the yard tracks need to be far enough appart to read the numbers on the side.
Off the top of my head, I can’t remember the spacing we used. We did go a little wider than normal to allow reading car numbers.
But guys, come on, you don’t space your tracks to allow clean-up of derailments. If you take your time and lay the track right, derailments are extremely rare. And besides, the prototype doesn’t space tracks to allow for derailment cleanups, so why should we? We are trying to be like them, right?
You space your track for operating and appearance reasons. On mainline and siding curves, you might space them wider to allow for the swing of longer cars or for articulated steam locomotives. Same thing in a curved yard.
The only time I would space tracks significantly wider is in hidden tracks and staging yards to allow for changing out cars or for that rare derailment, since access is limited to these tracks. Visible yards look strange with too much space between the tracks and this cuts down on the number of tracks you can fit in a given space.
But Bob Knapp is right, put some track down and actually check what you think is good spacing, then go from there. It all comes down to what you are comfortable with and what looks right to you.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to rerail that car where it sits. You lift the car out, pull the track, rerail the car in the open on the yard switches, then shove it back in. Unless you have really small hands, it is much easier to do it this way.
Good luck.
WOW!!WHAT A THREAD!!!Thank you, there, mikesmowers, for this topic. Brings back some real memories - although "horror stories’ might be a more appropriate attribute. You, at least, have a means of getting some guidance. I made some very egregious mistakes in yard design when I was first starting out.
I was in the Air Force at Moses Lake, Washington when I first got interested in model railroading. The guy who ran the local hobby shop was primarily into model aviation; he did, however, try, as best he could, to give me some practical advice. I never did meet any other modelers in the area; presumably they were around but I remained a lone wolf modeler until the Air Force transfered me to Leftover Air Force Patch in Massachusetts in 1964. One thing I never thought about asking was about track separation in yards. My Pracical Guide to Model Railroading (which I still have, BTW, over forty years after I bought it - its well worn, I can tell you that) gave 2 1/4 inch track spacing for double track; a yard is, in reality, double track so that’s where I went. WRONG!!!. Two and a quarter inches in HO is 16’4" and when you subtract the ten foot width of a car - (this knowledge came later) - you come up with a spacing of 7/16ths of an inch. One day I put a string of cars onto the ties and discovered to my horror that trying to get a 1/2 inch thick finger into a 7/16 inch space is like trying to squeeze nineteen gallons into an eighteen gallon gas tank.
I got smarter on my next layout - my second - and laid my track centers on 2 3/8ths centers - 17’3" in HO. That gave me a half an inch finger space between cars. Things were still too tight and rerailing could still be a headach so on my next layout - my third, and last, in HO - I went to 20’ centers (2 3/4 inch - 11/16 inch spacing between cars on adjacent track) and, for all practical purposes, I stopped having troubles.
When I shifted to N
If you are using a “ladder” of turnouts, the track spacing that happens automatically woks nicely. Extend yard tracks straight off of the “curve” side of the turnouts with the ladder formed by the straight sides. In actual practice this winds up creating about a 2" spacing with Atlas number 4 or number 6 turnouts.
While many are cautioning against having the tracks too close together, just to play devils advocate, I submit that the best looking yard has tracks tightly spaced. The farther apart they are the more “toy” they look to me.
If you are concerned about appearance, and running in the ‘50’s or earlier it was like 16’ both sides of the A/D tracks, to allow the carmen and oilers to work incoming/outgoing trains, and 13’ between yard tracks. sometimes the A/D would be 20 feet off the main, and the main would be higher about 6" or so. I remember times when an upset YM would have a yard track pulled to find a missing car, a whole lot less time than a clerk walking it!