The New Northern Central

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I don't know, Ed.  I'm not crazy about it taking ten minutes to get a train out of staging.  Everyone will be stuck in the laundry room trying to get out onto the main layout.  There's got to be a better way.  I think you need to keep simplifying it, because it's just too much.  Do you need a yard at both ends of the layout in the main room?  Why can't you have one yard on the bottom (eliminating stacked yards) and staging at both ends of the mainline?  Then, with one yard on the main layout, you have some flexibility to rearrange the pieces to get so much track out of the laundry room.

DFF

Oh. That's not a yard in New Freedom. It's a passing siding, a helper track and an interchange track.

The main work there is putting helpers onto and off of trains. One a day a local shows up, but that's it.

That being said, I'd imagine the way staging works is that I'd queue up trains to come out so the actual crew isn't waiting so long.

That's also the reason why I'm glad the north staging is so short.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Why don't you join the staging yards into one big one? This way trains comes out and goes in to the same track,

Phil

That's the plan, but up the other end. That said, there's no reason I can't connect the two halves on both ends.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Ed-
Each iteration is getting simpler & better - you’re on your way.   The time & effort you save by building less helix should offset a bit of the front loader cost......at least in your own modeler mind if not the family pocketbook!

As the owner of Tokamak-type superheated plasma fusion reactor. v1.1, I 100% agree with Gary that no matter the design, provide as much access as possible.  I haven’t had to go crawling inside the reactor yet.....but am able to when duty calls.

Michel

Thanks. You're so right about the hardest part being simplifying. I probably need to do another round of that on the visible side.

[mu26aeh]

Probably missed it reading thru everything, how far do you have to raise things in the helix ?

[CRL]

I’m hoping to have a small, 6-8 track double-ended staging yard in a parallelogram shape so the tracks are of equal length. It will have a balloon return track so that the yard can be entered from either direction. The staging yard will be considered as 2 different towns, depending on the direction of travel and will not be switched.

[DKS]

Can you post a drawing of the rooms with doorways, appliances, utilities, etc.? Without doors it's very hard to visualize the space and to understand where things can and can't be.

[garethashenden]

What software are you using to design this?

[GaryHinshaw]

Yeah, more info about the room constraints would definitely help, e.g., where is the door?

If New Freedom is just a passing track (as you say), then I'm less bothered about stacking those items.  Also, I completely misunderstood your helix proposal.  I guess the mid-run helix along the right wall is a small one, so that's not so bad.

RE the staging: could you just make the helix itself quasi-serial staging that connects the upper & lower decks?  Operationally, I'm pretty happy with my serial staging, and it seems like it could work for your ops concept.  You'd need at least two tracks in the helix, but that's fine, and you'd need to think about how re-staging would work.  But it would save long runs up/down the complete helix during a session, and you wouldn't need the yards hanging over the laundry machines.

I haven’t had to go crawling inside the reactor yet.....but am able to when duty calls.

I've had to crawl inside mine at least once per session, mostly due to operator error.  It's just really easy for guests to get confused about where their train is in relation to other trains in helix, or you have dragging equipment that catches on something and your train string-lines, or....

[wm3798]

Bag the notion of a helix to connect the two staging tracks.  Apart from being an engineering and design headache, it makes writing your car routing awkward.

Recall that when I had the temporary arrangement on the WM, all trains came from one staging yard, whether they were heading east or west on the layout.  This was made necessary by the wye junction that selected the direction, so once the trains got there, it wasn't so bad, but passing the yard, everything was hitting the yard from the same points.  You have mercifully avoided that gridlock here.

However, this set up taught me an important lesson.  Through staging is impractical if you are using a car routing system based in any kind of logic.  Simply put, the cars are moving always in one direction.  So a car that starts out being routed from, say, Baltimore to Buffalo enters logically from the south, and moves off the layout to the north.  No problem, right?  Well, if your car routing now has that same car positioned in Buffalo, wouldn't it be more logical for it to return the layout from the NORTH, rather than sliding through a helix and arriving back on the layout from the South again?

Especially if you are going to include a local, wherein the car that is routed from Baltimore to Buffalo returns from the shipper there with a load bound for Stewartstown.  Sure, you could blame a Penn Central era computer for routing the car back through Baltimore again, but wouldn't it make more sense (especially when you're writing your waybills) to have it return from the north?  Once unloaded in Stewartstown, the empty can then be routed in either direction depending on its next lading, but the through movements will now make more sense.

Auto parts cars are a perfect example of thru routing that benefits from having a balloon staging yard on each level.  Broening Highway to Cleveland, Cleveland to Broening Hwy... the same blocks of cars go back and forth... point to point if you will. 

That's why I ended up installing long, 4 track balloon staging at each end of my modeled geography.  This was especially necessary because I had traffic arriving at the yard from four different points, often with run through power from any of four other railroads.  I couldn't have a train that leaves for the west with NW power in the consist magically show up arriving from the east, or Reading units showing up on the Connellsville Sub west of Hagerstown.  Ed's Law notwithstanding, it just wasn't going to happen...   I know, Western Maryland Problems, right?

If you plan to locate a helix to make the connection, you probably have enough room to build out enough balloon tracks for each level in the same footprint.  Determining how long you want your trains to be (20 cars makes for a train in the vicinity of seven feet allowing for a couple of engines...  A 7' loop can be built in a diameter of around 36", and extend about 5' toward the throat.



Put one of these at the end of the low end, and 12-16" above it, build an identical one pointing in the other direction.

On JFRTM night, you set a couple of switches, and the train can circle from one staging loop to the other more or less continuously, perhaps with a clever arduino sensing the reverser circuit and throwing the switch ahead of the train as it reverses direction.

For commodities like coal, or automobiles, which would logically have empties going in one direction and loads the other, you would either have to work between sessions to "unload" the cars, OR, you could build a helix between the two staging loops so that traffic COULD all roll in one direction, in either direction.  In either case, this would be a staging maneuver, not a main line run, so @davefoxx won't get all bored and stand around staring at his watch and moaning about how tedious your layout is.

Long story short, continue balloon staging at each end of your main line run.  You won't be disappointed!

Lee

[OldEastRR]

Helixes are great boredom-producers. In this case putting them at the end right before the staging yards does provide a way to limit their effect to one person, a ops session position specially made for the task: the Helix Humper. This member would bring the trains out of staging and run them down/up the helix, stop them just before they enter the layout room, and hand them off to whatever road engineer will run them over the layout. Same in reverse -- road engineer stops his train just after the engines enter the laundry room, then the Helix Humper takes over and runs it up/down to staging and parks it. All session, his only job is to run trains up and down the helix to/from the staging yards.  Instead of everyone getting bored while their staged trains are rolling in or out of staging, it's only the Helix Humper, alone in the laundry room, who gets to be bored for the entire session. 

May want to provide some printed material or AV device for the Helix Humper. Possibly some liquid refreshment, also. 

[wm3798]

That's not a bad idea, @OldEastRR .  Same concept as having a local pilot bringing a ship into port through unfamiliar waters.
The challenge of operating the helix evolves into expertise, and the operator error factor is greatly decreased.
Lee

[MVW]

Put one of these at the end of the low end, and 12-16" above it, build an identical one pointing in the other direction.

On JFRTM night, you set a couple of switches, and the train can circle from one staging loop to the other more or less continuously, perhaps with a clever arduino sensing the reverser circuit and throwing the switch ahead of the train as it reverses direction.

Lee

Yep, that seems to be the most efficient approach. It's the route I've settled on.

Jim

[Point353]

Helixes are great boredom-producers. In this case putting them at the end right before the staging yards does provide a way to limit their effect to one person, a ops session position specially made for the task: the Helix Humper.All session, his only job is to run trains up and down the helix to/from the staging yards.  Instead of everyone getting bored while their staged trains are rolling in or out of staging, it's only the Helix Humper, alone in the laundry room, who gets to be bored for the entire session. 

The person with the HH job assignment is the one who drew the short straw at the beginning of the operating session.
Either that, or the host always takes that job in deference to his guest operators.

[Philip H]

Either that, or the host always takes that job in deference to his guest operators.

Yeah no. not Ed.  Not ever. 

[davefoxx]

I agree with Lee.  Scrap the helix, build two staging yards (stacked) that are just double-ended reverse loops with as many tracks as space will allow.  Simplify the plan, or the construction and maintenance may cause you to lose interest in the project.

DFF