Staging: Think about it now or.....

[Gary S]

Mister BiL votes for door # 3!

The space is there, it's at the end of a run, the space is at the rear of the benchwork where a (removable) structure/row of structures could be engineered to hide the staging ... it's the easiest/best spot because, deep in the dark recesses of the very back of your active, planning-it-all-out brain, you knew you were going to do this and left the room to do it!

Seems like a logical place... now, instead of the "Galveston" branch, I think I will call it the "Gulf" branch for now until I come up with a proper destination. Reason is, Galveston was already served by the class 1s... they would have no need to drop cars at the ATG to take them to Galveston. I'll find some obscure location with a cool name near the bays and coastline to serve as the destination and name of the new branch.

So.... we would have cars arriving via the SF that would need to go to the Gulf branch, and also cars from the SP too. With the SP yard right by the Gulf branch, how would we build up the Gulf train? The gulf-bound cars from the SP would be left on a track at the yard there, and the gulf-bound cars from the SF would be hauled the entire length of the layout, then a train would be formed up there and sent down the branch?

I need to learn more about how a real railroad would do this... but that info is hard to come by! And that is why I ask these questions here. My intuition tells me that placing the Gulf branch at the middle of the layout could result in more interesting operation. Cars from the SP and from the SF would be brought to Middle yard and then a train would be put together there and sent off on the branch.

Thoughts?