2006-05 The Game Takes Shape From Donboy Ah May with it's warm days and spring rains.  My youngest boy is one year old this month so we will both get some cake to eat.  The house remodel is moving forward and we will be getting our first batch of sheet rock installed this month.  eTechGLOBAL has a new batch of hosting servers and our hosting capacity will soon be up by a factor of 20.  It seems that I just need to hang on and get through this year so I have some quality layout building time in my future next year. After careful deliberation I have decided that my layout will work better if I adjust the trackage to limit the amount of dispatching needed.  Like many things with my layout this is a big change from the idea of a dispatching challenge that I had in mind to start with. To avoid creating a dispatching nightmare I will install double track between all of my towns.  Trains will take the right hand track and because my trackage will run at yard limit speeds between towns trains can follow each other keeping a reasonable stopping distance between them. Because I plan to increase my traffic in a natural way it will be some time before I need to add signals and a dispatcher.  I will still need a dispatcher and signals in the end or I will end up with to many trains in a town and the main line would get plugged. I think the double trackage is a good solution because I plan to run a lot of trains and a lot of traffic on single track would make my operators spend a lot of time waiting for clearance to proceed.  Waiting in a siding might be realistic but does not seem to be high on anyones list of fun things to do so limiting waits seems like a good idea.  The double track will also allow me to get my traffic levels up before I need to add signals and a computer interface for dispatching. When I get to my target number of trains during a session I expect I will need the double track to get all the trains over the line in a timely fashion.  You could say my move to double track is a prototype solution because that is what the prototype does when they have to much traffic for single track.  If we want to try a dispatching challenge after the layout is up and running we can always run using one  tracks to see if we can deal with it.