Can the 2mm scale guys teach us some stuff?

While watching some 'train porn' with Teach last week, I came across some real gems. The DVD was the 2mm society's 60th anniversary DVD with some footage of various layouts. 1 to me really stood out. This is Chee Tor, built 20 years ago by the Manchester model railway club. I think its supposed to be in the midlands somewhere on the old LMS route.



Its a beautiful model to look at.

The second, and even more interesting video is this one, which is a layout called Welton Down.
At first it looked like a pretty average modern British roundy roundy layout. then we got a look behind the scenes.



The most interesting part starts at about the 2:55 mark.
No, its not the fact that there is a woman operating a layout, its the amazing cassette storage system and its use. Place the cassette into position, attach the hair clips, run the train round, move cassette to other end, collect train, place back on the rack. Repeat until you get dizzy. Its much simpler engineering wise than a sector table spiny thing, in fact I think I could almost build one. I can see there will be some problems to be addressed like some sort of stop so that the trains don't take a header onto the floor, and some sort of padding so that they don't fall over every time they get moved, but nothing that's insurmountable.

It's just dawned on me today that I could use this for Paekakariki. I had been contemplating a couple of return loops with fiddle yards, and not really liking the idea much at all. this seems to be a much cooler idea, simpler, and could cut down on the number of operators required. in fact, I could probably get away with doing it single handed, as the train frequency isn't going to be that great.
the length could be varied depending on the location of the layout (I'm a bit pushed for space currently and I could probably do 3' either end in the garage, and 4-5 feet in a hall). The tables to base the ends on could also double as sides in the transport box.