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Okay... try this... Way back at the start of this thread I recall talk of the train engines cuting off and going somewhere ... to be serviced... WHERE? There has to be somewhere for them to go...AND... it takes both time for the loco(s) and crew(s) and a pathway. Two examples of pathway. 1. If you have a single track section (length of line in UK signalling language) that a train takes ten minutes to get through you can get a train through it every ten minutes... that's simple. If you are at one end you can despatch a train every ten minutes...BUT if a train leave you it will be twenty minutes at least before a train can arrive from the other end. 2. In the 50s British Rail spent a huge amount of time working out a complete new timetable for the train services through London Bridge Station. These services served three terminals,at least one through station and London Bridge (terminal and through) itself plus all the lines and stations out into Kent and part of Surrey. Hundrds of trains a day. having figured it all out they asked the man who had been in charge of the area of London Bridge during WW2 to check it out. he couldn't find a thing wrong with it after masses of work. Something told him that there was something wrong... could NOT find anything wrong... everything slotted together perfectly. He looked again. Nothing wrong. "So we can go ahead"? "No". "Why not"? "Don't know". "What"? then it dawnd on him... there were no pathways for empty stock movements... the passenger trains slotted together perfectly... there was just no provision to get the trains in place to become passenger trains. OOPS! This really did happen. The manager concerned was a friend of my Father. I think that you will see what I'm on about. Okay... so what do we do as modellers. Modelling a branch terminal is easy... everything comes in from the rest of the world and goes back out to it. Anywhere else gets as complicated as we want to make it. One way to do this is... You probably have some sort of idea of "where in the world" you want your bit of railroad to be. Very quickly and without complicating it draw this out as a quick sketch map of lines on a sheet of A4. Copy this and keep one copy as an original master. (You can go back to this as a reference point if you tie yourself in too many knots later). Okay. What you are looking at ... 1. the local environment... your yard 2. the neighbourhood (in rail terms)... what is immediately around it. 3. the "town/city" ... what else si in town and across town 4. the neighbours ... other RR ... they may own/operate some of those other things across town... or even right next door 5. the bigger world ... state level 6. the world bigger than that ... the adjacent states 7. bigger again... places some of your traffic may be coming from/going to Does the big world matter? Not if you don't want it to... but... if you want lumber from the Pacific NW around Chicago you have a reason for bulkhead flats and Cenhtre beam flats fom lines of that area. Again, you can work out that your yard services a power plant that receives coal from far aaway on a different RR... the cars may be foriegn and/or the locos may work throgh (possibly hand off to road engines in your yard. Those road engines from your company then make the haul and the unload moves to the power plant. While they're gone the foreign locos may well need to go somewhere to be services (you know about that now). The thing is this... It may pay/be part of the contract for the foriegn locos to run through. You're going to be using big power for this. It is then a diferent thing to make the short move and do the messing about unloading the train. So you do that with locos that used to be "big power". Your long distance Locos may be ACs, the local locos are SD40-2s or similar. The local locos have the grunt to move the train while the big boys get it over the distance reliably. In that context it makes sense to provide the track time/pathway and burn the fuel to run the big power away to be serviced. You could make the hand off out on the main adjacent to the loco facility but it will tie up the main and be much less fun for your yard working. I'll let you think about that lot for a bit. Have fun [:P]
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