The ends

 Asked in the comments section from yesterdays post.

Carbon8 said... This has possibly already come up in discussion, but would a turntable fiddle yard be of any use at one or both ends?

The answer is 'I don't think so, but....'

I'll qualify this a bit more.  At the southern (Wellington) end the electric locos don't get turned (the Ed's had one end facing north their whole lives), so I am leaning towards a cassette type system. I'll come back to this later.

For the north ( rest of the world) end I was leaning towards a loop arrangement, as its a bit easier for my limited wood working skills. a Turntable has to turn and do it reliably to the correct spot time and time again. However its only going to take up 5' by 2' of space. A loop will be 5' by 4' and I will have to go below a self imposed minimum radius of 600mm. the loop , unless it splits in 1/2, will be a bugger to transport, though I'm already at 2 car loads to shift it anyway. And how many exhibitions will I be doing a year? Maybe 3? Hmm, I now appear to have argued myself into a turntable set up. This could test my measurement skills somewhat.

For cassettes I'm thinking of using 2 pieces of non anodised aluminium angle on a wood base. the outside of the aluminium will have to be covered in paper so as to avoid the gentle tickle of the full powered DCC system. (it gave me a bit of a hurry up yesterday afternoon). Separate cassettes for the train and locomotives, and a simple connecting system (possibly just bulldog clips on the top).

I suppose I should also look at the number of 'consists' that I'm planning to build/run, not counting the self propelled stuff.

At the moment I have plans for;
Passenger;
-Daylight limited. 4 56' cars and a van, all nice and shiny.
-Steam express. 4 x 56' cars, 56' van and a 50' Z. A bit dirtier.
-Relief express. 4 x 50' cars and a 47' van. It may well wind up being more 'bitza' than this.
-Suburban. 4 x 47' and 47' van. Possibly a car-van as well.

Freight;
-Express freight.
-General goods (possibly with shunting)
-Perishables (fruit and veg from Hawkes bay).
-Frozen meat train.
-Sheep wagons.
-The tank train.

And that is a lot of storage required isn't it and a lot of modeling to do as well. Still I had planned to take 10 years to complete this project, and since I've only been building this since October 2009 I still have a fair bit of time to go.