Hi there folks, Just to introduce myself, I'm from Exeter, in
England, and I model midwestern roads from the 70's such as ICG, Rock
Island, BN, Illinois Terminal etc in HO.
I've just read back on some of your postings, and came across the
thread about Iain Rice's book.
I have operated layouts with sector plates and turntables, and can
confirm they do work, and don't (IMHO) detract from the operation of
the layout.
Ref turntables, suppose for instance you have a four track turntable,
with four trains loaded, each one runs "on scene", does what it has
to do, and heads back to storage. Only after all four have made their
appearance do you have to fully spin the turntable, it's not a
constant operation. Selecting from one track or another is no more
difficult than throwing a point in a conventional yard.
Certainly you have far less disruption than lifting off your loco &
caboose and swapping them over on each train!
There are also plenty of ways of preventing "plummeting" equipment.
They do take some "engineering" to get to work, but once they do,
they...well just do!
IMHO the "vertical" movable staging sounds a lot more dangerous. The
thought of lifting a cassette manually over that sort of distance
fills me with horror, and if the shelves were stacked vertically
above one another you would also have to turn the train in the
staging, to run into the next scene?
If you had three scenes, two above each other and the middle level on
one side, you could possibly develop some type of mechanical lift
where your train starts from yard A, runs into staging, runs out of
staging the other end into yard B, reverses formation, runs back into
staging and out again into yard C. That would work, but it's
complicated.
Train turntables, sector plates etc are all vintage UK proven
technology!
Martyn Read
