Possible Scale Switch

[RobertInOntario]

These trains are getting to be 13-15 feet long! many need more than one locomotive to pull them.

That's where selective compression comes into play, you could just make the train long enough so that it looks full-size, we already scale down freight trains and cities so I don't see why we can't scale down passenger trains.

There was an interesting article in MRR awhile back about "pike-sized passenger trains", it gave examples of real passenger trains that only had about 3 or 4 cars on them, It even showed a Penn Central passenger train with 1 car!

Yikes, I have to really "compress" my passenger trains on my small British 00 layout to 3 or 4 (at the most) cars -- otherwise, the train "overwhelms" the layout. I should probably focus more on early-20th century passenger trains where the passenger cars only had 4 or 6 wheels, etc. These 3-4 passenger car trains are scaled-down versions -- the real-life/protypical ones would have had 8-10 coaches.