Having seen the working arrangements on Geoff Taylors Barmouth Junctiona and John Elloitt's Leeds, I always wanted a meaningfull operating sequence to give a sense of time and place. It took 6 years to finally get hold of a wt, albeit 8 years before my chosen date. No doubt some service would have dropped out by 1960. I certainly havn't got 80 trains, but I could represent the majority of the traffic with the 22 trains or so that I have. Although I designed the storage sidings to be as flexible, they are remarkably inflexible as well, but I am trying to represent 3 routes to East of Basford North!
So I began with printing out a plan of the layout and representing the trains with 4mm sleepers, With practically no empty sidings, I needed to see where trains could go to represent a certain service.
Then using a spreadsheet I catalogued all the services through the station in both directions. Once I had that I could work through and see what i could represent in the 24 hour period.
Not every train could be represented, and successions of West and East bound minerals would look daft with the same train going round 3 times, so effectively I've cancelled some out. Some are just an out and back to the same road, others swap between Bulwell Common, Colwick and Notting Victoria. There will be a lot of duplication of course, for instance the Grantham Derby trains will be represented by the same train throughout the day, but it's the operating railway I want to portray. I've got far more stock than I can fit on the railway and I'm thinking about twhere to fit more storage sidings...
The next stage is to work it through and see if it actually works. The idea is that the sequence can be stopped at any time and restarted from that place. The spreadsheet has been printed out to scribble on and no doubt the sequens will develop over time.
Xmas wishes
Tony