Staging loop with spurs instead of a turntable - am I the only one daft enough?

I did almost the same thing years back on my old 00 layout, a loop with four spurs off it, and it taught me a lesson I still carry around. The loop alone swallowed about six feet by two, and because the spurs came off at an angle half of them were too short for anything longer than a paramedic van and two coaches. I spent most operating sessions shunting stock around to get the right train facing the right way, exactly as you describe.

What actually fixed it for me was ripping the whole thing out and putting a traverser under the back edge of the layout. Mine is a sliding deck about four feet long on drawer runners from a kitchen cabinet, sitting over the fiddle yard space. Trains roll on, you slide it along, roll off facing whichever way you need. It does the same job as a turntable for reversing stock and staging in a fraction of the footprint, and it needs no extra wiring beyond a short dead section so the deck can align. It is not as charming as a proper turntable, and my operating mates do miss the theatre of one, but for a loft where every inch counts it has been the single best trade I made. Given you alredy have the space eaten up by the pinwheel, you could probably fit a traverser in less room than the loop currently wastes.

I'll offer a diffrent angle here. I nearly went down the same road on my N gauge shed layout, sketching out a return loop with spurs to swap loco direction, and the footprint maths never worked even before you added the fiddly curved turnouts at the entry. What actually solved it for me was a traverser along the back wall. It's just a sliding board on drawer runners, about four foot long, carrying three parallel tracks, and it slides sideways to line up with the rest of the fiddle yard. No turning capability at all, but I stopped caring about loco direction once I accepted that trains run one way out and come back the other way in, same as a real branch line terminus. The dead-end spurs in the original post coud honestly become plain stub sidings fed by a traverser and the whole loop disappears, freeing up a proper chunk of floor. A mate of mine in the club runs cassette staging instead, just trays of track he lifts in and out, wich costs almost nothing if you're short of both space and cash. Either way the reverse loop is the part eating your room, not the turning.

Gotta push back on the idea that a traverser does the same job as a turntable. It only works if you've got track on both sides of it, because the deck just moves along, it doesn't spin. In a loft corner you rarely have that luxury, so you end up needing a run-round at one end anyway, which is half the problem you started with. I built a small sliding stage for a mate's shelf layout and we were forever shuffling locos off one end and back on the other. Fine for coaching stock, useless for a single tank engine that needs turning every session. Did either of you actually fit one in a true corner, or did you both have a straight back wall going for you?

First post here so go easy on me. I've got a similar space problem but in a narrow alcove rather than a loft corner, and I ended up using cassettes, basically lengths of track on a flat board that you lift the train onto and carry across to a storage shelf. Crude but it works for a handful of trains, though I only run short stuff so not sure it'd suit you. genuien question for those who've done the sliding deck thing, how do you keep dust out of the runners? Mine seize up if I ignore them for a fortnight and I'm wondering if a loft would be worse.