Talk to me about staging

[LynnB]

A few years back I had posted this same sort of topic in a different forum and a great modeler and friend had posted this reply :
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Snap whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr sssssssssssssssssss click click click.

OK Wick, I took the bait.

Let's take your own model railroad for an example. You will have the same trains running around and around switching the same cars over and over. That becomes boring after a while and you will wish you had more variety. That is where staging comes in handy.

Here is how it works in it's simplest form.

Assume you had an extra room in your house next to your layout room. A room where you can store whole trains full of fresh cars ready to run onto your layout via a tunnel through the wall.

These fresh trains could tour your layout picking up and setting out cars and then returning back to that extra via a second tunnel.

Operation would be more like the real world, where a train enters your town, takes care of business and leaves.

Many possibilities open up with this hidden train staging room. For instance, a passenger train, log train or ore train may pass over your layout on it's way to other destinations.

Or, you may have a coal yard on your layout, but no coal mines to serve it. The coal hoppers have to come from somewhere, right? In this case the coal hoppers would come from hidden staging where one can assume there must be coal mines.

In other words, staging allows you to expand your railroad into the rest of the unmodeled world.

I believe staging got it's name from a modeler that once described layouts as stages where the actors were the trains. We see this on television all the time. The scene remains the same but actors enter and leave the scene while the play continues.

Our railroads can be operated the same way if we have doors (tunnels) where actors (trains) can enter and leave the "scene" we have modeled.

I hope this helps you out a bit.

Doug
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I hope this helps somehow , it sure helped me, which is why I built a staging yard on a lower level of my layout with a fully automated reverse loop and seven staging tracks and the main rail coming from the staging comes onto the upper level from a mountain tunnel ( stage curtain ). I might add this is why I believe a layout should have a purpose so that the train has reason to run.