The Story of Hyde Yard
Part 1 of 4: Introduction
Sit back while I tell you a story... a story that has taken a long, long time to tell. It began back when I was around 17 years old: by chance circumstance, I happened to meet Rick Spano, owner of the world-renowned Sceniced and Undecided N Scale model railroad.
Rick Spano's Sceniced and Undecided has been entertaining visitors during tours and open houses since before I met Rick. Back then, staging yards were virtually unknown to model railroaders, at least in North America. But Rick, ever the showman, wanted to create the illusion that he had many trains running simultaneously on his mainline. His idea was to build a multi-track storage area behind a mountain range, where several trains could be held and released in sequence.
In order to support the illusion that there were many trains in operation at once, he devised a system to dispatch them sequentially from his hidden yard: as one train entered, he would park it and immediately release another. The issue he faced was the fact that the yard was completely hidden; how does one reliably operate trains that are out of sight? His solution was to use fiber optics. He installed a fiber for each track; one end was embedded between the rails near the yard turnouts, and the other was mounted in the control panel. A light suspended over the yard shone onto the fiber ends, and when a train passed over a fiber, the light visible at the control panel would be extinguished, indicating the presence of a train.
During shows, Rick would set up about six or seven different trains, two of which would be running on the mainline and the rest hidden in what he dubbed "Hyde Yard." As a train entered Hyde, Rick would watch the fiber optic indicator, and as soon as he saw it wink out, he'd hit a pushbutton that would change the track route. Since the selected route also controlled track power, the newly-arrived train would stop, and the train on the other route would depart. Thus he could maintain an impressive, continuous procession of trains.
There was just one problem... actually, there were several problems. For starters, the operator really had to be on the ball, ready to hit that route control button with lightning reflex. Thing is, shows often have lots of visitors, and visitors can be quite distracting—the result was sometimes disastrous. Also, there were occasional derailments on the yard turnouts, or failures in the diode matrix switch machine control. Not to mention that, during Rick's regular nighttime fireworks show, all trains had to be shut down because the fiber optic illumination lamp over the yard had to be shut off. Only a very few operators were trusted to run Hyde Yard, and I became one of them.
When things ran right, the illusion was magical. But, needless to say, shows were often fraught with technical troubles. After one particularly problem-prone evening, I suggested that we automate Hyde Yard. It seemed only natural, since Rick and I are both hardcore gadgeteers, and on the surface it didn't seem like something outside the scope of our abilities. Little did we know that my casual suggestion would lead to over a year of tinkering that involved rebuilding things multiple times and many late nights debugging issues.
Still, it was time and effort well spent, for it resulted in literally decades of smooth operation, not to mention that the yard remains quite a conversation piece with visitors. Today, staging yards are commonplace, featured in perhaps half of all modern track plans. But there's still only one Hyde Yard!