But it does get boring after about ten minutes.

Real operation involves a locomotive's assembling a train from cars in the railroad yard, and that or another locomotive pulling the train to a destination or destinations, dropping off some cars, and picking up others. That happens very infrequently in garden railroading. Too bad.

Why? Because if playing with trains is fun, operating trains is much more fun. If playing with trains takes your mind off reality for a few moments, operating trains will so absorb your attention and spark your imagination you may kiss reality goodbye until it's time to put away the choo-choos. In other words, the difference between operating and playing with trains is the difference between your taking an active or passive role. And to quote Masters and Johnson-Bar, in trains just as in sex, active is a lot better than passive.

But if your layout consists only of a loop with a passing siding you lack some tools necessary to enjoy a more active involvement in train operation. You should consider adding a second passing siding and a couple of storage tracks. The track plans in Figure 1 offer basic examples. Here is how they work:

Groundwork

First, you must establish industries at each location. In my imagination the main yard could represent a town with a variety of needs: warehouses and stores requiring inventory, processing plants requiring ore, trucking companies waiting for cargo to haul away from an interchange track, sawmills in need of lumber, and people hungry for food. The secondary yard could represent a mining camp. It would need food, retail goods, lumber, and empty cars to haul away the raw ore its mines produce.

Next, your railroad has to acquire appropriate rolling stock to transport the products each town needs: boxcars, gondolas, flat cars, reefers, and, if the secondary town is in an area where ranchers raise livestock, even stock cars. But it is also logical to have cars in a train with no direct relevance to either town, for example tank cars; they could be in transit between points your railroad supposedly serves but outside the boundaries of the layout.

So there you are with a train yard full of cars and a couple of locomotives idly puffing away. What next? Put together a train. Your secondary town needs a boxcar full of canned food, furniture, clothing, tools and hardware, glass, and anything else your imagination comes up with. It also needs one or two empty boxcars to load with ore concentrate. It needs a reefer carrying vegetables, milk, meat, and beer. And maybe a gondola loaded with coal to power machinery at the mine and furnaces in town. That makes up a five car train. Add a tank car and a caboose and you may be approaching the maximum tonnage of the locomotive servicing that town; the grades on the approach are four percent and tight curves contribute more drag.

So you assemble a train from the cars in the main yard and watch it do about ten laps around the layout while you drink a beer. Eventually you ease it into the secondary yard. But it must sit on the mainline; a string of cars is waiting on the siding. And to really mess up your day, a passenger train heading in the opposite direction is due through town in ten minutes. Problems are the basis for operation, engineers, and you have a big one.

Practical Considerations

Now the inevitable question: Do I need a lot of space for a layout such as the one you have described?

No.

Consider these thoughts on the advantages of small layouts: They tend to force us to concentrate on detail. With regard to construction, that often gives the railroad a better overall appearance. With regard to viewing, the mini-scenes of a small layout may offer the same visual variety as larger scenes on a big layout, so we tend to think of some little layouts as larger. Also the job of building a small railroad is far more manageable and the finished railroad is much easier to maintain. Finally, of course, small railroads cost less.

One apparent disadvantage might seem to be limited operation. That's an illusion. First, because regardless of size, most garden railroads may incorporate the features of the layouts in the illustrations. Second, because the most interesting, challenging, and realistically reproducible aspect of operation is switching, and you need very little space to do a lot of very complicated switching. Third, if a layout is so large you lose sight of the train, you might as well not be running it; the fun is in the watching.

We avoided the problem of a short mainline in the little vignette on operation by running the train around the layout several times before pulling it into the secondary yard. So it really matters very little whether a layout has a hundred feet or a thousand feet of track. After all, if we compare any model railroad to a real railroad, all the distances between stations are far too short. What difference does it really make whether the track runs twenty feet or fifty feet between yards? Real railroads run twenty or more miles.

The only actual disadvantage of a small railroad is the inability to run long trains and the largest engines. But most of us model narrow gauge or short lines. Neither uses large engines nor runs long trains. Besides, if long, mainline operation is what you want, either you'll need a lot of real estate or you should consider modeling in the smaller indoor scales.

Yards

One type of small layout anyone has room to build is a yard. Figures 2 and 3 offer two examples, one a "through" yard, the other a "stub-end" yard. Either could function as a terminal or as a point along the line.

The yard in Figure 2 actually existed in Nevada City, California on the old Nevada County Narrow Gauge. It has every basic component of a small terminal, and the tracks actually did stop at the short stub at the far end of the yard. The mainline enters from the top and branches into four tracks, a "through" track, a runaround, and two storage tracks. A "team" track dead-ends behind the station. Its purpose was for loading and unloading freight. In the old days, before trucks became common, teams of mules pulling wagons would draw up next to the freight cars--hence the nomenclature. The enginehouse lead and the engine service track/turntable lead provide the basics to maintain motive power. The Nevada City yard seems to have every element to be an ideal blueprint for a model railroad.

The yard in Figure 3 is a freelance example of a yard with stub-end tracks. The three storage tracks branching from the mainline dead-end. The track connecting them becomes a so-called "ladder" track. The mainline runs parallel. Locomotives would assemble trains on the mainline and use the adjacent runaround track to get to the other end of a string of cars. The dead-end track next to the enginehouse is a "rip"-track or caboose/engine storage track. A rip-track is for dismantling or rebuilding obsolete or wrecked equipment.

Each example has the most basic components of a railroad yard and each is small enough to fit into virtually any layout space. I included engine service and turning facilities on my freelance yard; they are desirable but optional on outdoor railways.

Wiring

Finally, the question of wiring. If you run conventional track power (as opposed to radio control), you may want to install electrical blocks in your layout. A block is an electrically isolated section of track, and you can turn it on or off whenever you want.

The Uncle Russ philosophy of outdoor layouts is "Keep them as simple as possible". That means limiting the number of blocks to the minimum you consider necessary. In the track plans, every siding and storage track is a separate block but the mainline has no on-off capability. The only way you can park an engine on the mainline is if it has an internal on-off switch such as the ones in LGB's Moguls. Otherwise, all trains must park on a siding or stub.

It is easy to wire on-off switches to blocks. Figure 4 shows how. I am a klutz with a soldering iron and generally inexperienced in anything involving electricity, but I managed to do a perfect job of wiring my own layout. Believe me, you can do it.

And then, the turnouts. In keeping with my philosophy espousing simplicity, the turnouts on my layout are manual. That avoids the possibility of short circuits, deterioration of underground wires, or turnout motors burning out. It does require two people to operate trains--one to sit at the throttle and act as engineer, the other to follow the train around, throw turnouts, uncouple cars, and turn the blocks on and off. And it is based on Uncle Russ' other philosophy about outdoor layouts: "If you're running trains alone you'll probably just want to watch them go in circles; operation is usually most fun when a friend is over." If you prefer to operate alone, you will undoubtedly want remote control turnouts and couplers.

Conclusion

We have looked at the most basic form of continuous loop layout offering operational possibilities. We have considered yards and their function. And we have discussed the basics of block wiring. Next time, for the engineer with very limited space, point-to-point switching layouts and branch lines.