Using Visible Staging Yards on a Model Railroad

You've changed your ideas on staging yards over the years. You've had return loops. And, one time you had the two staging yards directly across from each other at the end of an aisle. And now, you've got a kind of unusual design, where the two ends of the railroad are next to each other. Tell me about that. The first one we had, well we had hidden staging yards with a loop, five track yards with a loop on the end, which was a John Armstrong design from years ago. Very excellent design. The problem with that few of tracks in that sort of arrangement was that you had to keep moving trains up, one behind the other. And ours worked mechanically and electrically, as perfect as anyone could. But, we would suffer from human mistakes, including myself, of throwing a switch under a train, or running another train into the back of one or something. And I got to where I didn't like hidden staging yards. Now, the way to have hidden staging yards is have another room adjacent to your railroad room, where you can walk in there, and it's all laid out before you. But, there it is visible again. So, when I did these versions in the last years, I made visible staging yards, because I didn't wanna have them hidden. And then, I went ahead and scenic them many of them that I had. How do you define operation? Well, it's simulating what the Santa Fe does, in my case, or what real railroads do in every way we can that make some kind of reason that we, all our friends in operation argue about what is reasonable or what's not. Whether to spend real-time timing out air pumping up, and things like that is a question, which sometimes people want to do and some don't. It depends on how far you want to take it. That's right. Some people say, well the railroad's got to make a profit. If that's your thing, well that's okay. I haven't gotten into that. Takes a loss, or whatever. I'm depending on the Sante Fe account to take care of that for me. Because I simply move the traffic through that they dictate, really.