Southern Pacific Switching Layout

[FCIN]

I have been reading this blog:http://oscalewcor.blogspot.com/ I really like how simple his layout is and so I laid out track on the benchwork according to his plan and it looks really nice!

Justin;
Jack's O Scale New Castle Industrial Railroad is a very nice operation. In spite of how simple the track plan appears, it has lots of realistic operating potential. Small rail operations like this can be found all over the country if you know where to look. You certainly have plenty of benchwork available to model a small operation like Jack's.

One that I always found interesting and actually built a temporary shelf layout based upon is the Kendallville Terminal in Kendallville, Indiana. The operation is 1.1 miles in length and pretty much serves just one customer, a Kraft Foods marshmallow plant at the end of the line. Here's a Google link to the start of the KTR at their connection with NS:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s...7&t=k&z=18. Follow their line south and you can see all the trackage on the line. Not suggesting that you should or would even want to model this line, just an example of the type of small rail operations that do exist.

Since I still have not settled on the final track arrangement for my own freelance switching operation (just too darn many interesting industrial spurs out there!), I recently just temporarily glued down track the length of the benchwork (20ft) and put two sidings at one end just to get a feel for how things might work out. Took about 22 minutes to shove two inbound cars down the spur; place them and pull two outbound cars and return to the end of the spur. About as long as it would have actually taken on the prototype.

Point of all this rambling is that a layout doesn't have to be big or have every inch of available space covered with track in order to be fun and interesting to operate. The secret is realistic operations. When you get your NCE PowerCab, you'll enjoy switching even more!