I recommend watching the YouTube video George Sinos' presentation to the OPSIG which he gave yesterday. The link to it is here. The short story is, he built a switching layout in N scale on a shelf in the family room that ended up about 11 feet long, and it is so fun to operate, taking 2 people about an hour, that he's seriously considering canceling his plans to build a large basement layout downstairs. Here is what his track plan looks like:
He has a collection of about 400 freight cars that he rotates on and off the layout between groups of four op sessions, and uses a 4:1 fast clock, so that in four op sessions he covers about 16 hours of switching jobs to the various factories on the layout. He uses two ProtoThrottles for realistic engine control and JMRI PanelPro for a touchscreen to control the turnouts. I won't go on - you can watch the video for yourself.
His presentation reminds me of something I've often said to visitors to my layout - after 20 years of effort building the mainline from Seattle to Bellingham, I finally got around to building the Burlington, WA yard, and found it so fun to operate that I wondered why I didn't just start with that and not build the previous 20 year's worth of layout! I say it as a joke, but every joke has some truth to it.
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