I am in the final stages of fitting the baseboards in my loft so hope to start track laying soon but I am having second thoughts about a terminus that I had planned. I had orinally considered this as somewhere to store trains not in use as the space available makes a fiddle area with a lead in at both ends inpractical. I am now having second thoughts as with no platforms I could probabley have twice as many sidings or allow more space for some scenary. Since the terminus was not going to be a feature, it was just something to justify some dead end tracks, it now doesn't seem to make much sense. Just wonder what other people have done.
"Open staging" as we call it over here looks OK. Just ballast and paint the track to look nice, maybe put a signal box at the throat, plus some other small structures and details, and stuff like that, and most people will just take it for a marshalling yard. You can disguise the buffer end with a highway overpass (overbridge?), or a shallow cutting. I've seen both photos and actual examples, and open staging works surprisingly well.
Advantages: you can see the trains stored there; it looks like part of the layout (a fiddle yard never does)
Disadvantages: fiddling trains is done out in the open, which may spoil the illusion for some (really sensitive) souls; the yard tracks have to be widely spaced to enable rearranging carriage rakes, etc.
That's what I've done, well not actually loops but straight road staging ...
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Best of both worlds, continuous running around the back of the staging area to a through station on the other wall and a terminus built on top, lots of operating potential + storage.
I am intending to do that as well. The first option was to provide some storage quickly, building an underlayout fiddle area will take longer to complete. Of course having done that the terminus/siding on the layout proper become somewhat redundent. Needs some more thought.
That's basically what I've done with my layout. I've got eight loops (currently being reduced to six with two being changed to much longer single ended roads) incorporated into the main layout. It's not ballasted yet, but that's part of the plans.
I also contemplated adding additional storage roads above the main layout, but have not given that too much thought so far.
One option is to model the entrance to a passenger station, with the ends of platforms emerging from under the 'overall roof', inside the 'station' the platforms cease and the tracks are doubled or trebled, so the station serves as a fiddle yard
I think one can get away with open staging on a goods layout much easier than one can with passenger trains.
Goods trains sitting in a yard with a loco on the front looks acceptable, which is doesn't for passenger trains.
However, the idea of disguising the entrance to open passenger staging through a hole in the backdrop using an overall roof to hide the hole and visible platform ends is an excellent idea. It also makes modelling a large passenger station very much an option as you don't have to worry about building a large overall roof or how to access the trains once they are under the roof. Just model a foot or so of roof, the platform ends and signals. Use station pilots to release the train loco, use centre roads for carriage sidings and there you go. Just model the station throat in detail. That way, you could even have the "station" in another room and it wouldn't matter.
Yep, it's a great idea.
Cheers Roger T.
Home of the Great Eastern Railway
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There were plenty of coaching stock sidings during the BR steam era, and not unknown for a loco to be stabled with the coaching stock in the early diesel era.
Too true, the same applies to photography (most of the time), it's the everyday stuff which seems so mundane and common that people miss as time goes on.
Why so? Steve's paradigm of preferred proportional representation says that one should always model the *features* of interest. Everything else round the interesting feature is implied.
My layout is based round a double-slip point, an operating turntable, and a lifting bridge.
If I want to see mundane and everyday, I'll step down the end of the road to my local station. It doesn't come much more mundane than rush-hour at Wimbledon, and I cannot imagine any scenario under which I would want to invest time, money, and effort into recreating it in my house!
Doesn't mean you have to follow it. It's my rule that I model by.
I strive for, am still striving, for a realistic model railway. I want people who are in the know to say, "Southern Quebec, in the late steam era!" If you want to model class 66 diesels pulling container trains with an A1X "Terrier" shunting wooden 10 ton private owner open wagons in your goods yard, then be happy in what you do.
Roger's Rule could also be called the Principle of Implicit Realism. The unusual stands out and causes surprise, it draws attention to itself. A model railway layout, by its very nature, is unrealistic. A few people have modelled some station or bridge to exact scale, but most of use model miles of railway in a few few tens of feet of track laid around a spare room or a basement. In these contexts, the ordinary looks more real than the extraordinary.
However, unrealistic compression of space, placing items that in real life are far apart close together, is paradoxically more realistic than exact scale modelling. This IMO has to do with how we "read" a picture of a diorama. As Steve W has pointed out, the features of a scene/model are critical: all else is implied. An exact scale model of even a simple station is many tens of feet in length, and most of it consist of "background", not of "features." Such models, while impressive, are finally rather boring. There is too little to catch the eye and signify "this place rather than another place."
Hence we can model the features of our models and scenes, placing them unrealistically close together, and letting the viewer create his illusion of "reality" as he watches and enjoys. Factors that assist in this are angle of view and focus of attention. Both help the viewer ignore unrealistic aspects such as branch line whose terminus is a couple of feet away from the junction, for example. He looks at either the junction or the branchline.
Extraordinary items, even if prototypical, when included in an ordinary scene, will clash with the ordinary, and so spoil the effect. OTOH, a layout (or layout section) based on a single extraordinary feature, such as an ore loading dock, will seem "realistic" _if it includes nothing else_. The trick is to help the viewer focus on what you want him to see, and thereby help in the creation of the illusion.
IMO, Roger is right. The overall effect of realism that we strive for is best achieved by modelling the ordinary, the everyday, the typical. Some extraordinary features may be included, if judiciously placed so as to focus attention on themselves, without clashing with nearby ordinariness.
One problem, as someone remarked, is that people tend not to take note of the ordinary, so it can be very difficult to model a few years down the road. Examples include things like coal and coke sacks, once commonplace now very rare and made differently, and the details of the coal trade itself (if anyone lives in the Lakes there is a retired coal merchant there whom I would like to interview as he has a collection of memorobelia and memories of using railway coal yards). When did they stop painting traffic lights in black and white stripes? As for goods trains, I have spent many an hour with a photo and a maginfying glass, peering past some bloody great loco to see how open wagons were loaded when on the move. This is to some extent self-leveling as no one knows what is right no one spots the errors.
As for scale lengths I remember reading something by Cyril Freezer on that, given that we view railways from low down we get a compressed impression of the scale of things, the example he quoted was a station in London where standing on the end of the long platform you do not realise that the pointwork visible before the first overbridge is as long or longer than the platform you have just walked down. Hence it is possible to compress things a bit and retain a realistic appearance as the appearance of the model fits with the distortions we remember.
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