I know. Very basic. But sometimes the vocabulary is new to me. What is a staging area?
Thanks,
Jack
Staging is having made up trains or strings of cars out of sight that can be brought into the visible area of your railroad to give the impression it is bigger than it really is and connects to the real world. It doesn’t have to be that big either. A single siding with a Budd car or two could be held there and come into sight before returning to its hiding place as a connection for passengers on your 2’ x 3’ module to the outside world as an example.
A simple staging area can just be 1 track, for the incoming and outgoing cars from a small industrial area, not just for an outside commuter train or such.
Matthew
Think of the layout as a stage, and staging tracks as the “backstage” portion of the theater–trains (actors) waiting to take the stage and play their role wait in the staging area before entering the layout. Staging tracks can be a separate, hidden part of the layout, or you can use a visible part of the layout for staging, or you can have “off-layout” staging by adding trains using a cassette system (basically a removable 3’ length of track in a channel with a train on it–you hook it to one end of your layout and roll the train “onstage” under power.)
another way to look at it…staging tracks enter your seen layout area…the represent tracks arriving from an unseen city…or arrving from another railroad connection. You get the operational benefit of an arrivsal track, but little space is used because you dont model the other city…also the area can ‘hold’ trains or cars for a specified time, and in crease the apparent distance to the next city
Staging: The “rest of the world”
I find it interesting that in allt he articles int he 50’s, peopel such as Jon Armstrong were advocation a ‘hidden layover’ int he MIDDLE of the layout - the object being, I suppose, to keep ther ‘terminals’ as sincere terminals, and the hidden layover in the middle represented the unmodeled portion - thus you could model an east coast and a west coast town in a 15x20 room and legitimately say you had a transcontinental railroad - trains would wait in the hidden center part to simulate the time the train would take to cross the unmodeled part of the country.
It’s also interesting that at that time, no one thought about modelling the middle and leaving out the very ends - exactly what staging does for us. Again I think it was due to the desire to make actual terminals.
All in all, the same concept, applied in different ways, and we get two completely different results.
–Randy