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Traffic on Your Model Railway

If you stand all day long at the side of your favourite railway you will see many trains carrying many different products.

This type of goods carried will differ depending on where you live. Some areas are more industrialised, others are agricultural in nature. The traffic created on the railways reflects the needs of the industries it serves. Traffic also includes commuter trains and long distance trains as well.

Creating a good model railroad includes thinking about what goods are created in your area, what they need in supplies, and where are they going to.

It is very hard to create realistic traffic on a table top railroad. The best that you can do is to send traffic to a portable Railway Car Ferry, or barge, at the edge of your table. This allows you to take goods away from the layout, and bring back the “empties” later on. This style of operation existed in the Okanagan Lake area of British Columbia, providing service to an isolated branch of the railway. A small seen with the barge or car ferry could be built on casters to move it off site from the table.

It is a lot easier if you are building around the room or on a point to point shelf layout.

Let us consider a shelf layout using industrial railways. In our store we have a display layout that represents a small industrial switching layout. The layout includes a yard on an upper level with a switchback to the industrial area down below.

Our traffic involves moving goods from the yard down to the industries and back to the yard. The complications, and the fun, arise in having to move cars around one car at a time.

If you were to extend the layout to another yard with switch backs to a sawmill on an upper level and a port on a lower level this is the sort of traffic you could create.

• Lumber from the sawmill to east yard, from east yard to west yard, from west yard to furniture factory. Empty cars would be returned to the sawmill.
  
  
• Furniture from industrial area to west yard, west yard to east yard, down to the port. Empty cars returned to furniture factory.
  
  
• Grain from the port to east yard, east yard to west yard, west yard to bakery. These empties are used to ship baked goods to the sawmill via both yards, and then the empties go down to the port for more grain.

You could spend hours just completing one cycle of traffic on a layout of this sort. The same can be created on an around the room layout, moving goods from one side of the room to the other etc..

Similar traffic can be created for passenger service.

Push-Pull commuter service like Go Transit can send trains from a station down the wall to another station, and another. Servicing facilities to fuel and wash the trains can be added at one end before the trains return to the stations they visited on the way in. The trains do not have to be turned at any time as they just shuttle back and forth along the line.

Intercity passenger trains are best modelled by having the trains disappear from site to a storage area where they can be turned around. This is necessary to create the image that trains going westbound return from the west, etc..

As you can see there are many ways to create traffic on your railway, you just need a bit of imagination.

At Credit Valley Railway Co. Ltd. we can help you with quick questions or direct you to some of the books we sell on track planning, service facilities, operations, and much more.