It can be argued cogently, that there is no need to find a reason for the trains to run. Just sitting in the garden watching the afternoon express steam by, or a mized goods train strain its way up the incline is more than enough reason for the locomotives to be moving.

However, to give some rationale for the make-up of the mixed goods train, I now have a system.

I took photographs of each piece of rolling stock, and then printed and laminated each one – here you can see them scattered about the living room floor.

Then, not dissimilar to a pack of cards, you shuffle the deck and pick out half-a-dozen wagons: thus:

These then are the wagons that must be extracted from the sidings:

using my trusty shunter:

Plenty of manouevering over the uncouplers (you can see one in above) to detach the correct wagons and mashall them together. Thi s shows the wagons I was to gather:

and here you see them being hauled around, albeit not quite in the specifed order.

shortly after this photograph was taken, there was an incident ont he line:

The accident indicent report has yet to be published. Fortunately there was no loss of plastic life, so one thinks that maybe it will be brushed under the carpet. (could be a case of ballast accumlation at a crucial point on the curve, which probably should have been brushed and checked before operations commenced. Walking the track before the fist locomotive ventures into the outdoors is one of those sensible boring tasks, that needs an event such as the above to motivate one to do it, rather than trusting to luck. Well off for a quick afternoon running session. Better check the track first I suppose.

All OK, so time to send the passenger train round, with a train’s eye view for you all

Since shunting fouled the main line, sometimes shunting had to wait for the express to run through:

eventually the goods train was assembled, and here you can see it leaving the station as the passenger train approaches.

Finally here is a view from the goods train as it traverses the layout.