Wascana Canyon Railway v3 – Part 4

Efficient Passing Siding Design

In an earlier blog post I mentioned that one of the flaws in my design of the trackwork for the WCR v1 was a shortage of passing sidings. In creating the track plan for WCR v3 I was determined to rectify this. However, since the size of my room is not large compared with many that house model railroads, I needed an efficient design for passing sidings. While most of my trains will not be long, up to 12 cars, that is still approximately 6 feet of train.

The traditional passing siding looks like this:

The red train hides in the passing siding while the blue train continues along the main line. Say the space available allows for a maximum train length of 4 feet. It would be impossible for a 6-foot-long train to pass without having to break the train and park a portion of it in a spur track or another passing siding some distance away.

Here is a more efficient alternative:

Two passing sidings have been staggered, each of which can accommodate a train of up to 4 feet in length. By routing the turnouts as shown it is possible for a train of up to 10 feet to pass because the middle turnout adds additional space for the train to occupy.

Each of the passing tracks creates easy opportunities to add spurs on the curves, as follows:

Below is an excerpt from my upper level track plan showing one of these enhanced passing sidings (the blog post for WCR v3 – Part 1 shows the complete upper level track plan). The only difference compared to the illustrations above is that this will be built on a curve.