GALLERY
Pick a train. Any train. Just punch in your locomotive road number and get underway . Track power? DCC? Radio control? Most of the time our home layouts, either in the garden or inside, have staging yards where we can line up the various trains we’re planning to operate with. Sometimes they’re hidden and sometimes they’re right out in the open for all to see. This 1:1 line up of eastbound freight idols in front of the station at Melville Saskatchewan on a hot August afternoon in 1978 just as if you and I had set them there ready for an evening of pick-ups, setouts, waybills and bad orders. Vegetation hugs the trackside. Probably grain growing after a few days of summer rain.
Just like the real railways we allocate head end power that suits the task at hand. We might assign a pair of our newest, most powerful (most reliable) engines to that hot intermodel from Vancouver Terminal to Toronto and we might assign some older SD40-2’s (or GP9’s in another era) to heavy, less than carload, trains. Those 1500 horsepower switchers are relegated to the shortlines and ‘turns’ that feed the main system. In this case all of these 3000 HP engines are simply waiting their turn on the single-track main line.