Transfer Table Staging

Ample staging is my top priority for the new layout that is about to begin. I’ve toyed with several ideas from standard staging yards, to train elevators, to cassettes.  Cassettes actually work pretty well, and that is what I use for staging on my small layout, TWR.

For the room-sized layout I’m about to embark on, I have decided to go with a staging drawer, or transfer table staging. This concept isn’t new; it is covered in many posts at late Carl Arendt’s wonderful site. Also, here are a few of the fine implementations of the idea:

http://www.3fengel.de/en_layout-Dateien/Page429.htm

http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/themes/trc/forums/thread.aspx?ThreadID=87087

The Mega Drawer:

And the crazy, double deck, fully automated staging yard:

My design is going to be simpler than that.  I’m planning to have only 8-10 tracks, that are 40” long each. Something that looks like this:

The advantages of this system are:

• Operationally, it is a 10 track, double ended yard, with each track the same length
• Eliminates the cost of turnouts, frog juicers, turnout controllers etc.
• The drawer can fully slide out, so derailments and maintenance can be performed when fully extended. This allows the staging shelf to have minimum vertical clearance (about 2.5” in my case)
• Maximum capacity in small footprint/

Of course it’s not all positive.  The downsides are:

• Complicated benchwork.
• Indexing/track alignment is difficult.
• The additional cost of drive mechanism etc –> although this is sort of a wash by the savings from the turnouts.
• Sort of an unconventional way of doing things, so unforeseen issues may arise.

The layout which this staging is going to serve is going to be an around-the-walls shelf type layout. I had already decided to use track shelving to hook the layout to the walls. Phase I is going to be just building the transfer table staging. So far, I've attached the tracks for the shelving, two brackets, bracket saddles (as I've seen in Iain Rice's book), the drawer slides and the transfer table itself. I think I'm going to redo the saddles though as they still wiggle which affects the function of the transfer table. I was surprised to see that even with double-track shelving, the bracket still wiggles.

Anyways, here are a few pictures showing where I’m at currently:

And finally, here’s a video showing the current state:

 

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