I personally enjoy proto-length trains being hauled by correct consists. I find that the NMRA weight standards are far too heavy to allow that, which is why I don't bother with them, and in cases where factory installed weights are superficial to the proper assembly of the car, I remove them. I also make a point of trying to have MT trucks and couplers on most of my rolling stock. I still have a few cars that I need to convert, but all in due time. For me, finding a photograph of a freight from the period I model that shows at least what types of cars are where, and not necessarily showing road names, allows me to better assemble trains when I run them. As is, my rolling stock fleet lacks enough 40' boxcars to really put together a decent train for my PRR F3 A-B pair, but I only have so much money and only so much room to take stuff to shows. I sorta make it a plan of at least trying to think of what I might want to run the night before the show, that way I don't have to haul all five of my cases in two salesman-sample rolling carriers plus my briefcase with my engines and any specialized rolling stock. -Cody F. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
For me, the only place I can really run proto-length mainline, heavy tonnage freight trains is on the local NTrak layout when they set up. I also find that I never even look at the NMRA standards for weight because sometimes they are relatively impractical to attain and can interfere running longer trains but also, these days many manufacturers are producing cars with significant weight already in them. For this reason, I try and put my trains together following a relatively straightforward and fairly prototype practice of loads (ie.: weighted cars) up front behind the engines, and light (empty) cars at the rear. That's one reason why I love the Fox Valley Milwaukee Road cabooses because they have almost no weight, and they roll so easily, there is no worry about attaching a huge weight at the very of the train that will stress the couplers. Like Cody, though, I find that to even approach assembling a longer train on a show layout requires carting around a large case of cars and it gets rather tricky and time comsuming to put together attrain, and potentially even more so to take it back off the track, again.
I think I read here about a 3' mountain (in a HCD, that may be a bit much), but mine's about 16" tall. My HCD layout is designed for scenic compression, separation and protypical flavor. I specifically built the mountain as aview block. The tunnels also aid the scenic separation. The tall mountain allows for scenes like this: And the separation allows for focused scenes in which the short (12-15 cars) train size does not matter since you cannot see the entire train: There are no chasing tail train on this layout. It's about as simple as a layout gets: folded dogbone, one siding. I created signature scenes ont he prototype and the scenes (at least on camera) are independent of each other:
