Absolutely. In the 1990s, for quite a few years, I participated in a Sunday night informal club on a large layout in a 16x32 outbuilding behind a friend's house. We used card decks, wireless headsets, and all DC with manual block control, and had typically 6-8 operators. The bulk of a night's work was making up trains in yards, assigning them to operators, and the operators taking the trains over a very long mainline, making frequent stops with set-outs and pickups at numerous towns and yards along the way.
In short, there was a ton of switching.
Everything had MT couplers. But this layout was running on early-generation LL and Bachmann stuff and very little Kato. In short, the technology and quality of the engines was much more crude than what we have now, and still, switching worked well and was a load of fun. We used little hand-made skewer
tools to uncouple.
Can you do switching reliably in N Scale? You bet your boots.
Keep the rails shiny (and the wheels), do a good job laying the track, and it'll work.
