Originally, I had no thought of having a staging area into my track plan. I was already well along with benchwork when it occurred to me to add this feature. I had not yet laid track for the North Yard area and modified my design to include two long staging tracks. These tracks would be long enough to hold two trains each. I am using block occupancy detection for the mainline and decided to add three detected blocks to each staging track.
Using this idea, we can pull a train into staging and move forward until the location indicator detection block shows no occupancy and bring a second train into the same track just until the location indicator block shows occupancy and reverse until no occupancy is shown. This will give me two trains staged in either track.
I came up with the possibly ill-conceived notion of making these tracks hidden. To do this, I would have to create removable scenery to allow for the inevitable problems that will happen. Periodically I will also need to clean these tracks. I chose to add some city scenery and buildings and some hills. I have the city portion mostly complete. Below is the South entrance to staging, there is a turnout just inside the tunnel.
The buildings include a small station/hotel and an ice plant with a refrigeration car icing platform. These are all removable for access.
I have started on the removable hill scenery which consists of 1/2 inch extruded foam shapes which will be covered with screen wire and plaster cloth to keep the weight down.
The hills are broken up into four sections which will be easily removable. Hiding the joints between them may be the trick.
