Wednesday 21 August 2013

Layouts for Small Spaces : Fiddle Yards, Sector Plates and Traversers

With all of us facing the twin threat of less spare time and less free space, it's perhaps no great surprise that the small layout seems to be making something of a comeback, if indeed it ever really went away!

Sites like the excellent Small Layout Scrapbook (from the late Carl Arendt, author of Creating Micro Layouts) and books such as Planning, Designing and Making Railway Layouts in Small Spaces, by Richard Bardsley, all offer excellent ideas for those modeling on baseboards as small as 8'x1'.

Track plans for small spaces need to address one key issue : how to offer the maximum of operating interest, with a relatively short amount of track. In other words, how can we get as many locos and rolling stock onto the layout as possible, given that we have nowhere on-scene to store it!

The answer is to use a fiddle yard, sector plate, or traverser. Let's start with the basic fiddle yard.

What is a Fiddle Yard?

At its simplest, a fiddle yard is a place to store trains (locos and/or rolling stock) for later use. It represents the 'rest of the railway', and is usually off-scene, sometimes as a bolt-on, or folding section of baseboard.

The easiest way to construct a fiddle yard is to just have a series of points, and parallel tracks leading away from them. Of course, if you can't see the points, you have no idea whether they are set or not, so some form of indicator light panel will be required.

In addition, you may well not be able to reach the points to change them manually, so either a wire-in-tube control scheme or point motor / switch engine are also going to be in order.

Whether they are visible and accessible, or not, fiddle yards provide a great way to extend a small layout, and can be either on-scene or off-scene.

Hiding Fiddle Yards 'On Scene'

If you choose to place a fiddle yard on-scene, it should be hidden by a tunnel (inaccessible) or behind a wall or building (accessible).

Some layouts, such as motive power depots, can use roundhouses and turntables to hide a pseudo-fiddle yard in plain view, and there are sure to be many other ways to hide them.

Off-Scene Fiddle Yards

While an off-scene fiddle yard doesn't really need hiding as such, it can be useful to mask the fact that the train is disappearing somewhere by using a tunnel mouth, or having the trains pass behind a wall, as on the on-scene fiddle yard above.

However, the off-scene fiddle yard can be a more complex beast, use manual points, and remain visible to the operator at all times.

It may, however, compromise the idea of a small layout, and there may well not be space for an addition few feet of add-on baseboard. In such cases, there are a couple of tricks that can be used to reduce the space required.

Sector Plates and Traversers

The first trick is a sector plate. This is just a piece of wood that pivots between one or more tracks, and is best described in the New Railway Modellers forum post about Sector Plates. Once you have absorbed this discussion from the start to the end, you may well become a sector plate expert!

A traverse is easier in some ways than a sector plate, because it just moves forwards and backwards, allowing the rolling stock to be pushed (or driven) onto it, and then simply slid along to line up another piece of track to use as an off-scene siding.

RMWeb has an excellent article covering a fully-automated motorized fiddle yard, which may a be a bit ambitious for the small layout modeler, but will give you a good idea of what a traverser ought to do.

Back in the 1960s, CJ Freezer produced a number of great little books in a 'Railway Modeler Shows You How' series. One was called 'Turntables & Traversers' and is well worth a look if you can track it down!

Using the above techniques, quite complex operations can be built up, keeping an interesting minimum of rolling stock on the layout, and a whole lot of other options safely tucked away on the 'rest of the railway'.

No comments:

Post a Comment