I am considering building a staging yard beneath my layout. My layout is 48" tall. Does anyone know how far apart they should be? Please help!
NMRA recommends minimum of 2 1/4", some articles will say 2". Since you will probably want to use your out-of-scale fingers, these dimensions are tight. I tend to overdue it a bit and use 2 1/2" spacing on most everything (a 1/4" difference doesn’t take much space and it sure is better than knocking over those adjacent cars). I’m sure you’ll hear differing opinions so way all the benefits - Good Luck.
Ron K.
Sorry Ron, but i meant the distance between the staging yard shelf and the bottom of the layout.
An NMRA gauge is good for checking vertical clearance as far as the trains themselves go, however, build it with enough clearance to get your hands in there so you can access it easily. One of the reasons I recently tore down most of my layout and redid it was because I had a staging yard buried under the benchwork and when it started to need maintenance, I couldn’t get in there.
On my layout (which is also 48" high) the top of the staging plywood is 12" below the bottom of the scenic plywood. The framing for the scenic part of the layout is 1x4 (which are really only 31/2" wide) this leaves me with a gap of 81/2" in which to reach the back of my staging yard which is 24" deep. I have a total of 8 staging tracks. I use the front two tracks which I have spaced 3" apart for fiddling with the cars. The next 5 tracks I use for staging and the back track goes back to a reversing loop.