Putting it all together – Operating the
Kayton Short Line
The key to this layout is how it operates. Each car spot is
labelled with an industry and car spot number and one track
is set aside as an inbound / outbound (staging) track. My pet
peeve is having to “hand of God” trains on and off the layout.
This track is large enough to store a loco and up to seven or
eight cars ready to come into the switching area
Looking at [4] you will see I have allocated car spots starting
at the spurs’ far end from the switch and then consecutively
numbering forward until I reached the switch or the vacant
space. Don’t forget to allow for the length of the loco when
4. Car spots and occupancy.
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The Kayton Short Line - 6
5. Car spot
markers.
you measure the occupancy, especially for the inbound/out-
bound track and the runaround lead track. I use only 40 foot
and 50 foot cars, and so have spaced the car spots accord-
ingly. Some groups of car spots assume cars coupled together
whilst other car spots leave a gap between cars which makes
placing freight cars “on spot” just that bit more difficult. On
the whole, I have left the first part of each spur free.
The next step is to mark the car spots on the layout. Initially,
I simply wrote numbers on the roadbed but soon found I
couldn’t see these through the cars. I drilled a small hole
in the soft board and inserted a cooking skewer to indicate
the location of the car spot. The skewer denotes where the
freight car’s door should be. Adding flags gives a little more
meaning to the car spots but if you already have some build-
ings to install it will certainly enhance the space and look
much better!
The final step is to make up a set of car spot markers, one for
each car spot plus several “X” for exchange (these cars are
switched to Track 2 in any order). I printed one of each num-
ber 1 to 16 and six “X” marks on some lightweight card and
cut them out. Now you’re ready to go!
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MRH-Aug 2014
