Fiddle Yards vs Staging Yards - Model Railroader Magazine

I don't see this as a, "Versus," situation.  Properly, all, "Fiddling," should be done in staging, away from the visible part of the railroads.

OTOH, not all staged trains require fiddling, so it isn't necessary to provide 'Hand of God' access to every track.  Some pre-planning can arrange to get all the fiddling done in a specific, limited area, even when total staging capacity (in complete trains) rivals that of the Argentine Yard.

So, what do I have, and what do I do?

Passenger staging is all but impossible to access.  The only fiddling involves adding or cutting out a self-propelled diner from a DMU express train - handled with judiciously placed track gaps and uncoupling magnets, visible through a judiciously placed slit in the fascia.

EMU staging involves assembly/disassembly of five cars into trains of two, three or four cars.  Once again, facilitated by judiciously placed track gaps and uncoupling magnets, and a couple of extra crossovers.  The area is visible (window in fascia) and the topside scenery is removable.

Through freights (nine trains, twenty carlength equivalents, plus locomotives) are impossible to fiddle.  Changes are limited to changing the waybills in car cards.

Local freights (eight trains, twelve carlength equivalents, plus locomotives) in staging cannot be fiddled.  However, there is a cassette dock, accessible to both combustion and catenary locals, that allows a complete local train to be backed into a cassette when fiddling is required.  Several of those cassettes are specifically designed to allow carloads of loose 'coal' to be dumped, while trains in others can have open top loads 'adjusted' or cars pulled for maintenance or simply to change consists.  The cassettes are my answer to, "Too much rolling stock for the capacity of the layout."  Not all cassetted cuts of cars are accompanied by a locomotive.  I store cassettes, loaded and empty, on shelf brackets on the adjacent wall.  There is one short cassette used to transport rolling stock between the layout and the worktop in my 'office/shop' in the climate controlled part of the house.

Two things which I have done that are totally reversed to most people's experience:

1. I'm building/operating to a master plan that recently celebrated its fiftieth birthday.
2. Since I knew what I would need, I designed the 'netherworld' of staging, thoroughfares and cassette handling FIRST.

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - and the rest of Japan in hidden staging)