My On30 Acadian Coast Eastern occupies a 14' x 12' spare bedroom. Originally, the ACE consisted of an outer loop around the walls of the bedroom on hollow core doors, with a simple removable bridge across the doorway. The center of the room was left open – a place to bunk visiting grand kids on air mattresses. But about 18 months ago, I got the go-ahead to expand into the center of the room, where I had decided that a standard gauge interchange scene (Goodwin) and a sawmill scene (Tunk Lake) should occupy opposite sides of a center peninsula. Time for a reality check; the available space for the peninsula is just 80” x 38”, narrowing to 30” at the butt end. That's just right for another 30” hollow core door, this one with 6” of 2” thick blue foam hanging over the edge along the Tunk Lake side, but it's WAY too short for an operating interchange with the capacity I need. Almost all of the trains in my operating scheme either originate or terminate at Goodwin – at least 20 carloads of various kinds of freight daily, plus a couple of visits by the combine I use for passenger service. Since track would have to start curving to join the outer loop about 20” in from the butt end of the peninsula door, I was left with enough room for only about 60” of straight track and 15” of width for the interchange scene. For those of you who think in HO scale terms, that's the equivalent of only about 30” x 8", and in On30, a fully modeled interchange with a wee bit of storage capacity just won't fit in that space.
So after a lot of head scratching and hours of fruitless track doodling, I finally hit on the idea of using a pair of 48” staging cassettes for this end of the line. My interchange now consists of 4 parallel tracks. Track 1, the front track nearest the fascia, is a dead end siding, with a passenger platform for the combine near the end of the peninsula, and a trailing point turnout serving the Goodwin freight house running back to the butt end. Track 2 is a staging cassette dock with enough length beyond it for a 48” cassette that rests entirely on the layout. Track 3 is a second cassette, which has to be swapped with the cassette at Track 2 in order to connect to the dock. Track 4 (furthest from the front edge of the layout) is one length of O scale flex track long; it's a “dummy track” that holds a couple of standard gauge freight cars; it's there just to show the size difference between standard and very narrow gauge equipment.
Construction:
My cassettes are 48” long. They each include a pair of 48” long 1 1/4” aluminum L-girders – available for about $5 each at Home Depot, Lowe's etc. They're attached to a 48” length of 1x3 with liquid nails. The inside bottom edges of the girders are separated by the track gauge, and track power is provided through metal document clips that attach to the dock itself – just 1” long L girder sections mounted at the end of Tack 2 on the layout proper. This simple system works fine, but it's not an original idea; see page 15 in Iain Rice's Small, Smart, and Practical Track Plans for construction info on this system. I used 1 1/4” L girders instead of his recommended 1 1/2” girders just because I had to absolutely minimize cassette width in order to rest two cassettes side by side in my space. A 48” cassette is sufficient for a short On30 loco (I have several Bachmann Forneys and a Shay), plus a caboose or a combine, and 4 On30 Bachmann freight cars. Each cassette can also hold 6 freight cars and no loco or caboose. At present, I have just two cassettes, but I certainly intend to build more that I'll store “off-layout” as my rolling stock roster expands.
In operation, trains arriving in Goodwin pull into track 1, with the combine (if any) right behind the loco. After pulling the combine forward to the passenger platform to let the paying customers depart, I handle set outs and pickups at the freight house, then back down the main, reverse direction, and pull onto an empty cassette waiting at the track 2 cassette dock. The practical limit here is that I can't have more than 4 cars plus engine and caboose when entering a cassette; if I have more than that in my train, I have to leave a car or two on the freight house track. I then rotate this cassette to get my loco pointed in the right direction for its return trip, maybe swap cassettes to pick up more or sifferent cars for the return trip, and maybe spot the combine at the passenger shed for a while (it rides on the tail end of train on the trip from Goodwin to the other end of the line.) I've learned that I need an empty cassette for each incoming train, so the first train of my operating day is always a southbound departing from Goodwin, which empties at least one full cassette.
Originally, I enclosed this entire part of the layout inside a 16” high “box” with 2 sides – traditional hidden staging, with the box painted black on the inside and sky blue on the outside. Well, that made for an effective view block, but this whole area is right at the doorway into my layout room. It's almost the first area you see when you walk into the room, and that big, clunky view block box just looked terrible to my eyes. So I got rid of the box and installed a narrow line of densely planted trees down the center of the peninsula – a semi-realistic view block behind my semi-modeled staging.
The metal sides of the L girders do stick up 5 scale feet and intrude on the illusion that this is a fully modeled realistic scene, and I do know that staging cassettes aren't a part of ANY real world railroad (though car floats seem kind of similar to me), but now this area is starting to look at least semi-quasi-halfway reasonable to me. I still have more scenery work to do here, and I'm now thinking about how I might disguise the cassettes a bit more (maybe just with paint on the verticals of the L girders, maybe with a scale 6' high fence between Track 1 and the first cassette, maybe with a line of shrubbery instead of a fence there, or maybe a wood fence should be attached to the outer edges of a both my cassettes – hmm.)
