For the LSC WIKI
Definitely not. In fact some cars can come into town, and be set out to leave on the next train going a different direction never actually arriving at or departing an industry. It simply winds up at the fiddle yard at the opposite end of the layout. Also a car can be picked up from an industry on the layout and passed on to the fiddle yard at the end of the line…ie: the storage shed.
I think you limit yourself too much if you try to do have every industry on your layout. I know some people like paired industries, but most of us don’t have enough room to model very many, if any. Warren suggests a fiddle yard; I also like the idea of using an interchange track - a track that represents a place to send/receive off layout traffic.
On my layout, I have a staging track. I think of a staging track and the track that represents the rest of the railroad and beyond. Ideally, it would be located behind some bushes, but I pretend it’s not part of my layout; only part of the railroad that isn’t seen. I switch the yard and the town, but can make up an entire train and place it ready to go on the staging track. That way it’s coming from “off layout” bringing traffic into town.
No, that’s where your imagination and interchange tracks come into play. For example, if you have a Paint Factory on your rr that outbounds paint in cans the inbound tank cars of chemicals, boxcars of cans can all oringinate from the interchange track not from other modeled industries on your rr. The outbound loads of paint can be shipped in a boxcar to a warehouse on your rr or to another industry located on another railroad reached via the interchange track. This allows for a variety of frt cars and varoius different roadnames to come on your rr. On my former HO layout the 90+ industries on the railroad required a lot of cars to be brought in via the 6 different interchange tracks, lucky for me I work for a railroad that allowed me access to real waybills thus it was fun reseaching different shippers on various railroads coming up with waybills for my own model rr. No, I would think that the majority of industries on your rr will not actually be on your rr but rather reached via the interchange track, fiddle track, or hidden storage track.
I have a mixture of both. Some industries are served by other modeled locations, while others are served via an interchange track. Very few railroads were completely self-sufficient in terms of their industries. Even railroads like the East Broad Top, whose primary business was hauling coal from the mines to the processing plant, handled myriad freight shipments that came in from the “outside world.”
Later,
K
