A Removable Cassette

I decided to be fancy with the module I'm building and have a removable cassette.  If you're unfamiliar with this concept, imagine this:

• There is a piece of removable track that has guards on the sides
• You manually hold and slide this removable piece of track in and out of the layout
• The channel this track moves in and out of is hidden building the backdrop or structures

Here are some pictures to give you an idea.

You can tell from the pictures I've got a lot of mine built, but it's not all the way there yet.  The first place I saw the idea of a cassette was actually from Steve Bennett on building a Gn15 micro layout.  At the time I didn't think much of it until a year or two later when I saw a much more complex version in "Shelf Layouts for Model Railroads" by Iain Rice.  I clicked for me this time around.

Cassettes provide a lot to model railroaders, especially small shelf layouts.

1. Cassettes are your hidden staging

Sure, it's not a 12-track yard, but every railroad no matter how small needs some way to represent "the rest of the world".  Having at least one track that is hidden staging where the train can "enter the stage" and "leave the stage" is critical to operation.  Cassettes give you this for free.

2.  Cassettes let you pre-load your operating session

Because the cassette actually slides in and out of the layout, it's possible to build more than one.  This means you could queue up 2 or 3 cassettes with cars and have another 1 or 2 for empties.  You could have quite an operating session on a layout that's only 12 square feet.

3. Cassettes let you turn the train around

On small layouts, particularly shelf style layouts, space is at a premium such that a turntable is typically a large real estate investment.  Again, because the cassette slides in and out of the layout, if it is double ended it means that the train can be turned if necessary, without actually taking it off the tracks, etc.

So having said that I'm pretty exciting to get mine up and running.  I've got a few tricks up my sleeve for lining the rails up, but what I haven't yet figured out is how I'm going to power the cassette.  Of course you can expect a blog post about that when I do.