Staging areas

[Anonymous]

Do I need A staging area? What is the advantage of having them? I just notice that on alot of layouts that I have looked at in mags and online , that the stagingareas alot of times take up alot of room on the layouts.

[Jetrock]

You can have one if you want one--most folks who are heavily into operation like having an "off-stage" staging area to make up trains that come in from "off the layout"--but you certainly don't need one.

Obviously there's a minimum size of layout that would need to take advantage of a staging area--below a certain size any staging area would seriously detract from the layout! But a staging area doesn't need to be much more than one or two hidden tracks--just enough to hold your basic length of train out of view.

Staging can also be done in "onstage" yards at either end of the layout--even if both ends wind up at the same place (in the case of a loop track plan with a double-ended yard on one side.)

[Anonymous]

You seriously do not need one if you don't want to. I would like one, just for the fact that I woudn't have to handle my equipment as much as I do now. But right now I am out of space and dont even have the room to run a loop around down to a lower level staging yard. However when I get more room, one of the things on my to build list is a staging section.

James.

[Anonymous]

I'd like a staging area for the same reasons as the last reply - to save handling models so often. Three-unit drawbar coupled double-stack container cars are a real pain to take on and off track - you'd need three hands to lift them easily! I'm currently planning to build some kind of carrier for these that could be used for transport onto and off the layout, and for storage. Look at www.train-safe.de to see what I mean (I'd buy one or more of their products, but the prices are kind of steep for me, so I'll just have to make something similar out of some spare MDF and other timber I have).

[Anonymous]

To save space, and have your trains "self stage", take a look at "surround staging" as described by Mike Hamer in Great Model Railroads 2004.

Here is a link to Mike's page at our local club's web site:

http://www.ovar.ca/Mike%20Hamer/Hamer.htm

More pictures, but watch out for pop-ups and ads:

http://members.fortunecity.com/gknowles/layout/mh/mh.htm

Mike's layout is lots of fun to operate, and is very realistic for its "smallish" size.

Andrew

[dknelson]

What we call staging yards or areas are actually a rather old idea -- originally the idea was that a train would "hide" in a loop in a tunnel for a while to gave the impression of greater time and distance. Obviously this called for some special track work and scenery work as well. Some of the bigger Lionel display layouts did this.
Linn Westcott included such hidden "delay" staging in his famous "If I had a Million" layout, the one that influenced Monroe Stewart's huge modern N scale layout.

But the true modern staging yard seems now to be almost mandatory on medium to large layouts for the very good reason (in my opinion) that few if any layouts are actually so large that a train could ever realistically originate and terminate on them -- we should feel like we are in the middle of someplace and trains go by east and west. That is how most of us do our railfanning for example. Staging gives us a place to originate and terminate trains as models, as opposed to modeling a prototype yard or yards where this happens.
If you like having a model of a prototype yard on your layout by all means include it but staging is still useful since it is unlikely you have the space for two full yards and real trains do not originate and terminate at the same yard. Better to do a good job of modeling one yard (and use staging for the "other end") rather than have two inadequate yards visible on the layout, or pretend that one visible yard is both, say, Chicago and Los Angeles.
For small layouts staging can be a simple stub that comes off the oval; it is hard to imagine a layout so small that there is not room for some kind of staging.

If you have stub ended staging then either you need someone to manage it if you want to reuse the locomotives, or you need enough locomotives for all your trains and once the train has "arrived" that is it for that operating session. The advantage to "self staging" yards (essentially an oval type track plan) is that the train is ready to go for that same session or the next session. I operate at a layout that uses a variation on both - the layout is a big oval but trains do not continue on through. Rather the same staging yard is both the extreme east and west of the layout and the staging operator handles all arrivals and departures, takes cars off the layout or puts new ones on, changes the destinations on the car cards, and tries to keep track of whether the power has arrived on an east or west bound train (since engines can't fly, it would not do to take power that just arrived in Peoria and pretend it just arrived in Galesburg!).

This is a long winded way of saying that staging yards can, at little cost 1) increase the realism, 2) increase the fun, 3) enable you to make use of more of your cars and engines, 4) make operating sessions longer and more varied, and 5) provide more things for friends to do while the trains are running. They can pose a planning challenge but that presumably is part of the fun too.
Dave Nelson

[Anonymous]

I have a small HO layout (2' by 12'). It currently doesn't have staging but it was designed to have it so just now it is a bit limited. The addition of staging will make a big difference to how i run it.

So my answer is that if you design it in then you need it but if you design it without you don't. The resulting layout will operate differently but it is up to you.

[Jetrock]

There are certainly minimalist ways to do staging--a cassette system can be used to "stage" traffic onto the smallest shelf layout. I might use such a system on my own, in fact, at least until I get the rest of the Belt Line modules finished--and, even then, I'll use a staging track. My prototype was a belt line with a mainline going north and south (physically north and west.) In the final version, there will be a hidden track going from the west corner (southbound traffic) to the north corner (northbound traffic) so, in essence, a completed train will exit to the south and then arrive from the north shortly thereafter.

A cassette, or one track--those are staging too...

[dehusman]

Staging in the modern context represents the "rest of the world".A train originates in Houston and runs to Kansas City. You Ft Worth to Tulsa. The staging yard represents the portions of the "greater railroad" from Houston to Ft Worth and from Tulsa to Kansas City. So the train from Houston would be build in the south staging track and when it was time it would come on the visible portion of your layout , do its thing and then "continue to Kansas City" by going onto the north staging track. Similarly the southbound train could do the same thing. It is as if you were standing at the station, a train appears in the south, goes by, and then disappears to the north.

Dave H.

[Anonymous]

Thank you guys for your insites on staging areas! I now know what they are used for, I just didnt under stand them being new to the hobby, but with your insites I do now, Thanks agian



By the way I want one now and will have to figure out how to put one in my layout of corse.

[Anonymous]

A staging area can be as simple as a length of a plywood a foot thick and 8 feet long with a ladder in it. One could place cars for a train and run it onto the layout. When you are finished with the staging, you could store it out of the way when not in use.

Lee