My original track plan included additional sections for the harbor town of Tennant's Harbor (now spelled Tenants Harbor) and a quarry. Since I won't get around to building those sections for a while (if ever!), I added a four-track staging yard to allow me to run trains in and out of Thomaston. One track will represent the quarry, two will be reserved for Tennant's Harbor, and the fourth will be an escape track to allow locomotives to run around their trains. The railbus gets its own cassette so that I don't have to dedicate an entire track to it.
I used Kato N scale unitrack so the tracks can be easily reconfigured in the future. The unitrack is code 80 which matches the Peco track used on the rest of the layout, so I simply soldered a short piece of unitrack to the adjoining flextrack and then connected the staging yard to that piece. All of my locos and rolling stock handle the #6 turnouts without problems, and the turnouts are power-routing so electricity is only fed to one track at a time. At some point I may add an electrical control panel but for now I just operate the turnouts manually.
The staging yard runs in front of a window well so there is a fence on both sides to prevent accidents. At the far end there is a unitrack plate girder bridge that serves as a cassette to turn locomotives. The unitrack joiners make it easy to align it with the staging tracks.
The tracks are laid on 1/8" cork that ends just short of the cassette. There is a sheet of white styrene under the cassette that shims it to match the staging tracks and also makes it easier to see what you're doing as you move the cassette between tracks.
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