Yard as a Layout

[steinjr]

Thanks for the links and suggestions. After looking through what was quickly available, I noticed that none are of just a yard, with the cars going off into staging to be delivered. Is this due to the propensity to "cheat" when operating by not putting the cars into the correct order when they are just going to get shoved into staging verses into an industry spur where the miskate would be made obvious? The lack of scenic options? Certainly the prefered design seems to me to be a yard with industry(s) to switch, or just industries to switch but not a stand alone yard?

Not likely to be because people "cheat" - what would be the point of that if your layout were built to be exclusively a sorting machine? Not likely to be because no one else has ever considered your idea - few ideas are truly new :-)

Most likely because yard + industry switching tend to offer more variety than just yard work. You still get car sorting when switching industries (perhaps using a small auxiliary industry yard to organize your cars before delivering them or before heading on).

This is e.g. a relatively small layout with a nice little yard, based on a track plan by poster Arjay1969 (Robert Beaty) in the Kalmbach forums:


Here is a discussion thread in this forum about a sorting yard based on a yard from David Popp's Naugatucket (sp?) layout:
http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic...35&p=14471

But how about we get a little more specific? How much space do you have available for a layout? What scale do you you want to model in? What do you want from your yard?

Smile,
Stein