I am designing a layout with a 210' main line with 4 towns with sidings that hold 20 cars and 1 large midpoint city, main yard for railroad. staging is under this city and I have 135 inches to build staging, the main must run through for continius running. Would you build an 8 track double ended staging yard or a 12 track stub ended yard, either way half would be east staging and half west staging. Thanks for any info.......
I would build the double ended yard for several reasons. If the yard is a stub end yard you will have to back trains one way or another. Into or out of the yard, N-Scale cars, with truck mounted couplers, tend to derail when backing up. It is not the track work that causes this. It is the cars themselves. With a double ended yard you can pull trains through the yard. Will you be removing cars from the track by 0-5-0(hand) method? If so you might allow for room to get your hand around a car, engine, etc. If you are not going to break up and make trains in the yard, by hand, you can make your track centers a little closer. One more thing I would like to pass on. Don't depend on switch points to feed power to the yard. Put in insulated rail joiners and run wires for power feed into the yard and put an off/on switch on each track. That way you can shut off power to a track and not have to worry about a train being parked.
Thanks for that Paul. Kraydune - I have to agree with porky. If you have the room for, and you plan facilitates double ended staging then that's the way to go. My preference is to point-to-point plans with a continuous run connection via double ended staging – IMHO it offers the best of both worlds. The automatic re-staging is the biggest advantage - but one of the fringe benefits is the ability to simulate heavy traffic density (like commuter trains) with less track and with less equipment - really all the Metra trains in Chicago look alike
