Source: Model Railroader

The notion of size in model railways changed as smaller scales were introduced over time: HO (1:87) in the early 1920s, TT (1:120/1:130) in 1945, N (1:148/1:160) in 1962, and Z (1:220) in 1972.

A similar change - although only partly linked to the introduction of smaller modelling scales - has occured in the perception of just how small a "small layout" can be for it to be worthwhile to build and run trains on.

In terms of track design, the fiddle yard is a simple staging area with a number of tracks which allows the rearranging of trains off the layout proper. It's true importance, however, lies in its conceptual design:

"The basic idea is simple. You just end the layout in a few parallel sidings, and carry out any necessary rearrangement by hand. These sidings represent the rest of British Railways." (Freezer, 1961)

The fiddle yard started to appear in the late 1930's when British modellers wanted to operate small layouts in a realistic manner; in the 1950's, Cyril J. Freezer would regularly feature fiddle yard to terminus type layouts as editor of Railway Modeller and as such had an enormous influence in spreading the concept and making it popular - adding his own design, "Minories", to the classic track plans of that layout type.

One or two truly small layouts are present in the publication, but they were labelled "portable layouts". And again, it ultimately all pointed to a much larger setting.

The popular hobby magazines on both sides of the Atlantic were still showcasing big and beautiful layouts, but the railway modellers who first took to the internet were less so inclined. Very often, the layouts they were building, operating and describing on the web were small shelf-layouts, some of them even in "minimum space".

One important such example which became a source of inspiration for many was Scot Osterweil's NYC Highland Terminal switching layout, which made its online debut in 1994 (Scot presented an update in Kalmbach's 2015 How to Build Small Model Railroads).

But it was not all virtual - in the UK, Chris Ellis, former editor of the Airfix Magazine, produced and published Model Trains International, highlighting a modelling approach which was the pure anti-thesis of the sprawling British "Railway of the Month" and the US "Basement Empire" and focused on shortlines pretty much around the globe (MTI, which had a small but loyal readership, ran for a total of 118 issues before being cancelled in 2015 as Ellis retired).

Gradually, the concept of building and running a small layout in its own right and not as a stepping stone or a stop gap on the way to the XXL size "dream layout" had progressed into UK (and, to a lesser extent, European) mainstream modelling.

It also started to appear more and more in North American modelling, as the cover of the September 2004 issue of Model Railroader shows.

Even smaller layouts started to appear in the UK, which were just one little step up from a static diorama - such as Tony Wood's Barber's Bridge (which was featured in the January 2000 issue of Rail Express Magazine).

An absolute minimum-space layout, the scenic section of this diesel fuelling point measures only 22" x 8" (55 x 20 cm), with an additional 14" (35 cm) of hidden track allowing for movement of the locos onto the three short sidings. The layout was built within a few weeks and at a cost of just £20 at the time.

Over the years, various concepts evolved around what came to be called "minimum space layouts" in British modelling terminology. Most of these center on how to run trains on a small layout in order to sustain interest in it, but some have taken up the question of how small a layout can get and still be workable, leading to a whole range of "micro layouts" which really are as small as you can probably get.

This modelling concept found its master in the late Carl Arendt, whose excellent website on micro layouts is still being run and updated to this day: the micro and the minimal space layouts really form a special category of small layouts (which often also allow the use of larger modelling scales in spite of the small overall layout footprint, such as e.g. Jim Read's O Gauge 7mm micro layouts).

Carl Arendt's early internet presence (he launched his website in 2001) along with his books no doubt helped to make the concept more popular with North American modellers.

Also included is a portrayal of John Allen, who way back in the 1950s already felt that modellers should

"start small and build well. Plan your small railroad for operation rather than as a race track, and build it with care. You will be amazed at how much fun a small pike can be."

How much the "small layout" has shrunk over time can be glanced from the fact that his original Gorre & Daphetid RR - to which Allen was refering in the quote above - had a footprint of 3'-7" x 6'-8".

Newer layouts depicted in How to Build Small Model Railroads, however, show a clear tendency of leaning more and more to the (smaller) British / European shelf layout concept.

A follow-up publication in 2018 titled Build a Small Railroad offered a similar collection of smaller and not-so-small layout concepts.

Small layouts: real world inspiration

But back in July 1974, passenger trains were still running through the cramped streets of Weymouth on their way to and from British Railways Southern Region's harbour terminal, connecting with ferry services. Things were so cramped that, for safety reasons, trains had to be "walked" by railway staff - who were also in charge of clearing the route of people and badly parked cars. On occasions trains were even escorted by British Transport Police.

In order to reach the station trains had to run through a long tunnel and, when emerging from the steep cliff of St Boniface Down, immediately faced a three-way-point. This had been installed to do away with the need to use a turntable for runround moves of locomotives - although these still had to enter the tunnel during any such manoeuvres.

It is a scene that many modellers would almost instantly discard as being "unrealistic", and yet Ventnor (closed in April 1966) was by no means a singular case.

Operation - the key to sustaining interest in a small layout

The word "operating" is used, above all, to indicate that models are run to reflect - but not necessarily faithfully replicate - one very important and central aspect of any real railway : there's a purpose to it.

On the real railways, trains hardly ever move "just like that". Maybe it's to earn revenue by transporting passengers - such as the British Rail Southern Region Electric Multiple Unit (EMU) calling at Clapham Junction in 1971 - or maybe it's to maintain the infrastructure, which is the basis of being able to run such revenue earning trains - such as the two trains involved in extensive trackwork at East Croydon in 1983.

These two scenes may be views from specific areas and eras, but the same procedures take place time and time again on rail networks the world over.

"Operating" trains on a layout is therefore an attempt to mimick this by attributing a purpose to most or even all moves taking place. Some of the concepts applied in order to achieve this were formed in the context of basement empires, others were developed explicitly with small layouts in mind. Some attempt to be as close to actual prototype operation as possible, while others are loose interpretations.

Operational concept: what a small layout is all about

You could have mainly passenger services, or passenger services with an equal share of freight, or freight only, or even a specialised setting with specialised traffic, such as a motive power depot or a civil engineer's yard. One possible example to illustrate this point comes from the preserved Kent & East Sussex Railway, where an English Electric Class 08 0-6-0 diesel shunter is ready in April 2001 to shunt stock at the railway's main station site at Tenterden.

Contrary to this, a British outline model railway layout completely devoid of any form of facilities catering for passengers has for the longest time been unusual to say the least. Nonetheless, the earliest published example of a freight-only concept for a layout seemingly comes from the UK: In the June 1926 issue of Model Railway News, A.R. Walkley, a member of the Wimbledon Model Railway Club (the second oldest in Britain), published an article on his "Railway in a suitcase", which was pioneering in terms of being H0 scale two-rail.

The layout also featured a system of automatic coupling (really an essential feature for a shunting layout) which later on was marketed by Tri-ang, became known as the "tension lock coupler" and is still used as standard coupler on many UK ready to run models today (thanks to Morgan Lee, longtime librarian of Wimbledon MRC, for much of this information).

Trackplan (c) Dave Howell, used with kind permission

However, shunting layouts need not necessarily be small - they can be enormous too, if for example they incorporate large classificiation yards.

"It is not obligatory to incorporate passenger facilities into a layout, and indeed there can be very real benefits when a small layout is designed around a specialised service."

However, only 3 or 4 of the 60 layout plans in the booklet reflect this statement, and to this day, the vast majority of British modellers seem to suffer from horror vacui in the absence of passenger facilities on a model railway layout. More recently, however, the internet - having gone from a niche interest in the mid-1990s to now being the single most important source of information and communication platform for all hobbies -has helped change this heavily lopsided approach to British railway modelling.

Searching in Google for "switching layout" yields approximately 41,800 hits (December 2021); the string "shunting layout" is less frequent, but around 20,900 webpages will still keep you busy perusing their content. Plus, layouts depicting shunting yards or switching areas are popular topics in many online discussion groups and fora.

Operational concepts for small shunting layouts

As their name clearly implies, small shunting layouts already have an operational concept and a purpose to sustain interest in running locomotives and stock on it: shunting - which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "pushing or pulling a train or part of a train from the main line to a siding or from one line of rails to another" (its equivalent in North American railway terminology according to the US Department of Transportation being switching).

Class 08 diesel shunter on the British prototype layout Little Bazeley (above)
EMD SW1500 switcher on the US prototype layout Pecan Street (below)

If you take the following trackplan as an example, things might look something like this.

Step 2
Reversing the waybill, the boxcar has now been unloaded and loaded again; it is taken to its new destination, the Atlantic Warehouses

Step 3
According to the directions on the waybill, it is removed once the boxcar has reached its destination, revealing that after unloading it is to return empty to the Westside Yard

For every operating session, one of these scenarios is selected for the "Consolidated Tooling Co". In order to acknowledge that according to the traffic flow concept worked out for this customer some of these scenarios are supposed to be more frequent than others, the scenario list is broken down to scenario cards (one card giving one scenario) in varying numbers. As a result, scenarios 2 and 3 would appear on 5 scenario cards each, whereas all scenarios involving the delivery of a flat car would only have one. Shuffling these cards, the chances of having a flat car delivered would thus be smaller. Once the "move" is made, the card goes to the back of the deck of scenario cards, making sure that flat cars won't appear too frequently at the "Consolidated Tooling Co."

This system works well for small layouts and is fairly realistic in its approach: rail customers usually don't care at all whether the boxcar used to ship their goods is brown, green, yellow or pink as long as they turn up on time and in sufficient numbers.

For several years now a number of modellers - who almost exclusively model North American railroads - have come up with ideas and answers on how to adapt the shunting layout formula in order to make it both workable and realistic for modelling the modern railway scene.

Amongst these, Lance Mindheim is probably the best known, as he combines stunning modelling with a fully fledged concept of how to design, build and operate a realistic (modern) switching layout which he has highlighted in four books published between 2009 and 2011 (How to Design a Small Switching Layout, 8 Realistic Track Plans for Small Switching Layouts, How to Build a Switching Layout, and How to Operate a Modern Era Switching Layout). His various Florida industrial park and spur layouts have almost become a model railroading sub-genre, inspiring many subsequent Sunshine State switching layouts; Mindheim also runs a blog on model railroad design in conjunction with his commercial layout planning service.

As railroads merged and lost their local foothold, names or random numbers given to tracks serving customers became incomprehensible to a centralized dispatch structure.

Parallel to the introduction of computer systems in the late 1960s, US railroads drew up industry schematic maps for their road crews. They list industry information such as where to spot loaded or empty cars for unloading/loading for a specific customer, the track capacities, and other pertinent information, all in a consistent format.

Different US railroads use(d) differing terminology for this car spot designation system; the acronym SPINS is an abbreviation for Southern Pacific Industry Numbering System - it originated on the SP but was also used by e.g. BN. CLIC (Car Location Identity Codes) was a Santa Fe term for the same thing, as was ZTS (Zone, Track, Spot) on Conrail.

The example shown here comes from the 1987 Conrail ZTS for its New England Division - and really explains it all. If a freight car is to be set out at 04-829-07, then the ZTS map will tell any crew that its destination is car spot 07 on track 829 in Zone 04, and that the customer in question is the Generic Inc.

It is also easy to see how requiring freight cars to be placed in specific spots can add not only additional realism to a modern era switching layout but also beef up the challenge of operating it considerably. All of a sudden, that single industrial spur doesn't seem that bleak anymore.

The United Warehouse in Wichita illustrates what this looks like in real life, but even a drastically shortened building can provide operating interest on a switching layout using car spots if it either serves several customers or a single customer requires specific goods to be delivered to specific locations on his spur.

The new goods shed in Peterborough embodied British Railway's perception of modernised freight working by rail; goods vans could be unloaded either into the goods shed (where a conveyor belt helped in moving the goods to their correct storage space) or outwards onto road vehicules which distributed the goods elsewhere.

A long row of 12t goods vans standing at the newly modernized Peterborough goods shed in 1960