“Bwahaha! I have you now, Mr Bond!” [Exits Stage Right]

(Another guest post. I swear these guys are writing more posts than me at the moment.)

I stared at that Onehunga plan for a while today. It’s a nice, compact, achievable, self-contained layout that could probably fit along your average bedroom wall and with it’s staging yard, has enough operating potential that could keep me amused for hours (“uncouple damn you!”).

Staging yards or interchange tracks are hardly a new innovation, but they certainly get a lot of airtime on the three pages of ‘Model Railroader’, that well known journal of dry modeling theory, that aren’t advertisements.

Staging yards serve at least two sensible purposes:
You spent time, effort and money on rolling stock so you might as well run it, but can’t fit it all in the four track Onehunga yard. Voila, keep it offstage-right and bring it in as the mood takes you.
You want to run different trains to destinations, through the layout, perhaps to match the schedule on “the real thing”. To save time, you stage them up behind the curtain and simply run them in right on time, or late if you are modeling NZR. You may even have staging yards at each end to present stuff coming from somewhere and going somewhere else. This appears to be the only approach sanctioned by the MR gruppenoperationsfuhrers, the rest of us are just playing with toy trains. As an aside, a tip for those on a budget: if you model the glory days of the recent Tranz Rail ‘Beard era’ you’ll only need one consist – a rake of empty container wagons to shuffle back and forth.

So that’s the good stuff, but staging yards also present locational challenges. If they are in “plain sight”, they never look as nice as the scenicked* part of the layout, they take up a lot of potential layout space, and to make things worse they usually take up the best bits of the room along the walls. So you could optionally hide them:
In another room through a ‘tunnel’ in the wall… unlikely.
Hidden around the outside of the room behind a backdrop or under hills, as featured in a number of MR plans, but probably the stupidest idea ever – have these armchair gurus never had to clean track, nudge locos, see if a train is completely in a siding or fix derailments/uncouples?
On a lower level under a modeled yard or scenery– sensible enough if you can get enough vertical clearance between levels for finger access, but this takes some length on a 1 in 50 grade.
You could scenick* them and actually have your trains starting and stopping at a modeled ‘somewhere’ rather than offstage.

Next, how do you get the most into your staging space while still allowing you to send trains back out. Some options:
Proper double ended yard ladders, as depicted in the Onehunga staging yard, give you the flexibility to run around your trains and shunt them about a-la the real thing and no need for excessive 0-5-0 shunting.
The “stub ended staging yard”, another gem from MR, saves space by eliminating one of the ladders and is probably OK with our short trains, but rearranging a 50 car American freight by hand in N scale so the heavy stuff is at the front and the light trailers are at the back (surprise, not all the manufacturers follow the weighting rules) and the 12 engines are all in the right place is just another silly idea in my book. Taken to an advanced level of absurdity is the “hidden stub yard”. Now there’s a winner.
Reversing loops – a great idea if you have the space as the yard folds itself in half and the train comes out facing the right way.
The clever Brits have evolved all manner of ways of staging short trains in small spaces – sector tables, traversers (made from desk drawer runners) and cassettes are common. Again a bit of five finger shunting is in order here, but with small trains, not such a big deal.

So. To close, here are two alternative staging possibilities for Onehunga. Firstly, you could scenick the right end later on and plop an industry or two there so each end is both a destination and a staging area. Secondly if space was an issue, you could shorten the staging yard using one of those English gimmicks to fit in a smaller space, or to make more room for the station and/or the single line journey between staging and Onehunga.


* Scenik: an NZ120 word derived from the Russian