Operations is a design requirement

Operations should be designed into your layout before a board is cut or a screw turned. That does not mean that you cannot retrofit your current layout to make it operate more effectively. You certainly can, but there is the work to pull down what you already have, fix it, then put it back the way it was. That’s a lot of work for something that you can build in from the get-go.

For a layout to be considered an operational layout, it should meet three basic design goals:

• The layout should allow a train to do work (add to, subtract from or otherwise alter the consist),
• The layout should allow the train to be directional (arrive from somewhere before going somewhere else, even if that is back the way it came), and
• The layout should give the train a purpose (this means it serves a need in our modelled community).

The layout design must contain all three of these design elements to be considered an operating layout, that is,  designed and built from the start for operations.

Let’s begin by looking a little deeper into each of these points to see where the benefits of good small layout design lie.

Doing work

Work for a train can mean many things on a layout. Let’s look at nothing but passenger services for a moment, which I am sure most people would consider kind of boring. A typical passenger train can:

1. enter a platform, stand stationary for a period of time before moving on to the next station up the line,
2. require the locomotive to detach from the train, run around, and rejoin it at the other end. Or it could need, in the case of a steam locomotive, to take on water and or coal
3. go to a refuelling point before returning to service, or
4. go directly into a storage siding during an inter-peak period before re-entering service later that day

There are many options for passenger operations, especially in earlier eras where mail and parcel traffic were a normal part of day-to-day operations.

My favourite small passenger layout is by the late, great Cyril J Freezer: Minories. His four-foot layout (with additional space for a fiddle yard) allowed for bidirectional running, shunting, and full signalling all in that small space. His arrangement of turnouts is pure genius. Allowing trains to arrive on and depart from any platform.

The layout plan is shown below.

Cyril J Freezer’s Minories

Freight operations have as much, if not more, operational scope on small layouts. Two that immediately come to mind are the Tuning fork layout, Inglenook sidings, and many more designs available from the carendt.com website. All are simple and easy to build and complete, and will provide you with much enjoyment.

The Tuning Fork (courtesy of Carendt.com)

Inglenook Sidings (courtesy of wymann.info)

Operations may be expanded by the inclusion of a run-around or loop. Its inclusion allows a train to do the work on the layout for which it was intended: bring a train to a location, switch the cars of the train for cars at industries,  reform the train with cars from the industries and leave the location. You’ll notice that all three design goals are included in that short description. Primarily, it is the loop or run-around that makes all of these goals possible.

The run-around or loop

The train must be directional

A train on a small layout needs to come from somewhere (visually and mentally) and, after completing its work, go somewhere else. This means that you must have somewhere for the train to come from before working on the layout and to go to when that work is finished. This can be the same place – such as single-ended staging, or it can be two different locations – such as staging on both ends of the layout.

Giving the train a purpose

Trains serve communities. These communities may be the wider community as in the city or town and its people, or it can be a few businesses that are served by the railroad itself, or it can be the staff that the railroad serves. No matter what scope you choose to model, you must have a purpose for the railroad. A yard, a junction or something else, it doesn’t matter; you simply have to find yourself a focus for the game.

What’s needed to begin realistic operations

To begin our trip into operating your model railroad, we need to have:

• The playing board (layout or module(s) upon which our pieces (locomotives, freight and passenger cars) move,
• Rules that define how the pieces may move,
• Cards that are used to modify or determine the behaviour of the pieces,
• Markers, cards or other identifying means and methods to track our playing pieces when out of sight, and
• A beginning point and an end point to the game.

Foundations of the game

What this means is that we are looking into the reason the railway exists, whether we model from the prototype or freelance, to determine:

• The period during which our model will be set
• The location in which our model will be set
• The industries on the modelled area of the layout, and
• The industries off the modelled area of the layout.

The last may sound counterintuitive since we are talking about modelling yet these offline industries are just as important in creating the context of your layout being one part of a larger working railroad. For example, they give us:

• Destinations to which products are shipped off the layout,
• Sources of our business’ raw materials, and
• A means to determine car routing.

With a list of shippers and receivers of rail-transported goods (on and off the modelled portion of the railroad) and the location of the layout and its nearest railroad interchange or yard we have the basic parts to build a transport plan for our small model railroad.

Whether you model a freelanced railroad or not you now have the means to run trains in a prototypical manner including the routing information. You do not have to model everything of course, we are trying to have fun with this hobby, not make it like work for ourselves. Keep in mind though that at its heart model railroad operations is nothing more than a board game with some really cool pieces. While there are no winners or losers there are many means for us to determine what works well and what does not.

This is more true now that Digital Command Control (DCC) has come into widespread use. But we’ll go into the whole DCC thing later on this site. Many of us started in the hobby with an oval or circle of track that while fun at first soon loses its gloss. After all, going around in circles is not much fun. Here though is where operations come in handy. Because with only a few modifications and a little imagination that circle or oval of track becomes so much more. By using directions such as East and West, North and South and naming every location on the track, adding a siding or two that serves an industry your little piece of the railway now has some greater context. Thus going clockwise means running East from B town to A town, via Gunning Gap, where you have to stop and switch out the Gunning Gap Co-Op’s grain elevator. Even with just these simple modifications, you can see the difference. You have begun to create your own little world not unlike creating a location for a novel. Or you can copy it from a real-life location and industry. The level of challenge is up to.

• Go from A to B under the direction of a driver or engineer,
• Do work as needed at B,
• Return to A from B when you are finished,  and
• Park your train, detach the loco from the train and then park the loco where directed.

The Operations section will look at how I use operations as the main design component for my railroad. Is it a definitive treatise on operations? No, but then I’m not talking about running a large model railroad, using signalling, train orders, and other movement systems. We are talking about the first and last mile of railroading here. Where the customer meets the railroad.

I’ve put links in the bibliography section of those who are far more capable to help you through learning about the myriad ins and outs of operations if you want to go down that rabbit hole. My aim is to help you bring operations from being a mystery to action on a small layout to keep your interest and participation in the hobby going for many years to come.

Read on for more information in the next section – 104 – The Ops plan.

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