As above

I am building a simple small terminus.

I have in the distant past used a fiddle yard at tother end and a sector plate. Having seen Cassettes in use at exhibitione can some one give the pros and cons of each as I am undecided which to use.

I would be pleased to have photos/drawings of cassettes to see the various designs.

Thank you

John

Hi John, is it a permanent layout or portable ?  If permanent then the sector plate allows you to load 3 or 4 trains to run a session, whereas the cassette system you have to load a cassette to put a train on ,remove cassette to put on another or remove a full one  and replace with an empty to remove a train. You could of course have 2 cassette roads giving more flexibility.       If portable then of course the right type of cassettes can act as storage units as well when the layout is not in use. You could combine the two methods, have a sector plate that you load cassettes onto, giving the best of both worlds   Cheers   Matt

Hi John, I tend to go with traversers nice and simple, cheap, no points or motors, however my local clubs exhibition layout has cassettes and they work very well, but they can if handled badly cause a very expensive clatter when all your lovely stock rolls off onto the floor, we made some removable barriers to fit at the ends when we have to turn them, it gives a lot of confidence to the operator when handling them.
Pete.

I do a bit of both, a 6 road fiddle yard terminating at a turntable and a single cassette road; my scenario is to run local and "hourly"  London services with a few "one per day" services like a Pullman "Belle", Pines Express, and some other longer distance services like York, Newcastle and Birkenhead/Liverpool; the locals and hourly services and goods use the fiddle yard the dailies and any "specials" each have a cassette. The long distance services allow me to run stock from other companies, LMS on the Pines, LNER on York/Newcastle and GWR on the Birkenhead.

Specials can be just about anything, from Excursions to Football specials and summer Saturdays, again allowing stock from other lines.

The fiddle yard turntable allows me to turn the loco which can then either run round for the next trip or get parked on a siding while another loco takes the train out, if you think about it the coaches usually stayed in the same order only the loco being turned and changing ends . One fiddle yard road is a short dead end which is used by a push pull service.
(could be a railcar or DMU on a modern image layout)

I use cassettes primarily because I don't have the space to have any other type of storage facility such as a traverser, sector plate or ladder of storage roads. Whilst I accept there is a danger of stock falling from badly handled cassettes you can take steps to manage most of the risk incorporating sides and end stops. They do have a number of advantages over othert methods. They are easily turned, you can store as much stock as you wish provided you build enough cassettes of course. If you have more than one layout they can be used on all of them if you wish. They can be designed to be your stock storage.

If I had space or a larger layout would I use cassettes? I think I would but in combination with some other storage method.

An explanation of my cassette design is shown here from post 375 to 391 if you are interested.

Much Murkle