What is this term called in model railroading?

JonMyrlennBailey

Active member
This is where trains go in and out of "tunnel portals" in the wall or backdrop to a hidden room used as a staging yard.

I have this on a Trainz layout. Trains shoot in and out of holes in the train room wall at 45-50 scale MPH. In the back hidden room is about 5 scale miles of track and a large yard. Trains have time to decelerate gradually before going into the yard and parking there for a set number of minutes according to AI schedules. When trains get back onto the mainline again, they have enough track distance to get up to speed before shooting back into the train room through the portals.

This gives the visible layout a more realistic effect with a wide variety of trains that don't appear too often. I hold the various trains in the back room at staggered WAIT FOR times between 10 minutes and one hour. The diesel hood unit freight trains, the majority of my trains, have shorter wait times and appear more frequently as they are the most commonly seen train kinds today on real-world American roads. The steam locomotives with classic passenger trains are geld for an hour since they are special or excursion trains. Modern D/E passenger trains time out in back for a half hour for each and every lap around the closed loop layout. 5 miles of the loop is hidden while 7 miles is visible. Each siding in the staging yard is designated for each and every one of my 10 AI mainline trains. This lowers congestion and frequent noise on the visible mainline. Trains appear more occasionally and naturally as on a real American road. The unnatural toy train look of going round and round the track is eliminated and yellow signals are greatly reduced. The mainline in the visible section stays green most of the time as traffic there is now sparse with the addition of my new large back room to hold most of the trains there at any given time.

The backdrop is one of Dave Snow's sky/forests/mountains so the tunnel portals blend into the background of the wall mural. The trains just look like they are going in and out of mountains which are just painted images on the wall. Trains just naturally disappear into the tunnels clean out of sight.

I could have used the portal train emission content but those trains generated don't have a very nice cosmetic skin and one can't customize their looks as one can trains that are actually placed on the tracks in Surveyor with individual engines and railcars.

The portal holes on the backdrop looking like tunnels act as my train emitter for AI-driven trains.
 
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I think you are referring to a fiddle yard, but I might be mistaken. Fiddle yards are used to store inactive consists that are then driven on to the model railroad then are returned out of the way. You are simulating this operating using the Wait for... command.
 
I guess I have a fiddle yard room. It's a clever way to make trains not appear too often and too much on the visible layout: the area of the route of interest to spectators. The fiddle yard is undecorated and not glamorous. It's a functional mechanism behind the scene much like the pin-setting machine and ball return machine at the bowling alley. Some physical model train people use their garage or an extra room in a house as a fiddle yard.

I'm having trouble keeping AI trains in the fiddle yard from bumping into one another at junctions between the sidings and the ladder. It does no damage when the trains touch one another but out of personal pride I'm trying to perfect my fiddle yard. One train will just ghost through another that's in its way or too close to the switch points. I have to do a lot of trial and error in placing dwarf signals in strategic spots and using numerous Trigger Multiple Rules trigger setups to establish logic and order in this yard. I'm using the various Auran simple USA signals, 04 permissive and 05 absolute, these days and AI has gotten much smoother since the complex signals, double lights, were pulled out.
 
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Staging yard vs Fiddle yard

A Fiddle yard usually is movable, rotatable ... etc ... and is where a Model Railroader uses his 0-5-0 sandwich clamp locomotive (his hand) to manually re-arrange and move railcars cars about

A Staging yard is where you store already assembled trains

http://rail.felgall.com/fyd.htm


https://www.google.com/search?q=mod...bh9ngAhXNmeAKHbyxCIYQ_AUIDygC&biw=909&bih=530

http://www.housatonicrr.com/staging.html

https://www.google.com/search?q=mod...NidngAhUNmuAKHXy3B7wQ_AUIDigB&biw=909&bih=530
 
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Then I have a staging yard then. Thank you, gentlemen. My trains park in the staging yard after each and every lap of the route and remain assembled there. They just take periodic pit stops there. It is all AI automatic.
 
There is perhaps some difference between British and American terminology. Here in the UK Staging Yard is not used - except maybe by those who model American prototypes. Fiddle Yard is used for any non-scenic area representing the rest of the country. It can be served by turnouts (often known here as points), or be a set of return loops, or a traverser, or a set of moveable cassettes. Some ingenious modellers use a system of vertical, sliding cassettes that can be lined up with the track serving the scenic part of the layout. Other possibilities are a turn-table accommodating one or more complete trains - a good example being on Peter Denny's Buckingham layout - or in the case of a club exhibition layout a complete set of sidings forming part of the basic oval, presumably therefore a Staging Yard. Whatever it's nature, a Fiddle Yard is deemed to be out of sight - although my experience at exhibitions in the past was that members of the public were at least as interested in the working of the Fiddle Yard as in the scenic area - sometimes even more so. Hence the popularity at some exhibitions of having the Fiddle Yard in full view.

So as far as those of us in the UK are concerned, I agree with John.

Ray
 
I think your main difficulty with AI is running at high speeds ... I like to watch my trains running out of tunnels, and in yards, at slow speeds, of 1-5 mph, increasing to 10-15-20 mph ... rarely do I place a speedboard higher than 35 mph, as trains become a blur, rushing past at breakneck speeds, spitting out of tunnels, and shooting out of staging yards ... running red signals, and overshooting speedboards and trackmarkers with a SPAD (signal passed at danger).
 
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If your AI trains are bumbing each other at the switches, you need to remove a coach or wagon or two and make the consists shorter. Using signals too at the exits (not entrances) to the yard helps as well, and in a sense you are signalling the fiddle yard/staging yard or whatever you want to call it, as you would a real yard or a bunch of passing sidings (loops).

Remember the old KISS method. There is no need for triggers in this case. I have used this before, when portals were broken in the early version of T:ANE, and a simple setup with multiple long sidings (loops) all signalled at the end. Using Navigate via track mark and then a Drive To track mark command to be very specific, I was able to control the AI quite easily.
 
Trainz has always that problem with red signals. I do not understand why it happens. Worst, I do not understand why still happens. cheers and sorry for my bad english.
 
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