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How long should my passenger train be?

Most model railways struggle to accommodate full-sized passenger trains, to do so would require huge platforms and therefore a huge baseboard, and that's a luxury most of us don't have. So how long (or in this case short) can a passenger train be before appearing uncomfortably short?
The answer is one that most depends on the individual's willingness to compromise. The average length of an express passenger train in model form is around four coaches. That length is long enough to avoid the locomotive dominating the train (which is all that most require) but is short enough to make purists turn in their graves. So to determine how long your train should be, you should first ask yourself where you lie on the purist spectrum.
If you desire longer or more realistic trains without them looking too out of place at stations, you could always achieve this by following the increasing appetite for part concealing platforms under a shopping centre or townscape with only the end of the station in view. This method leaves the lengths of the platforms to the imagination but the reality is that most of the train sits 'off scene' in a fiddle yard or behind a backscene. It is cheating a little bit, but it's also an incredibly effective way of operating full-sized expresses realistically on a smallish baseboard.
Of course, not all passenger trains require such ingenuity, many branch line trains from yesteryear and more modern secondary inter-regional trains only featured three or four coaches, even when loco-hauled. So you could choose to model those instead, but the takeaway here is that you do have an alternative to operating half-sized consists.

So in summary, the lengths of your passenger trains depends more on your willingness to compromise than any rule. Don't worry if you don't please other people, you being happy with the result is all that matters. However, if you do desire prototypical train lengths, you can always hide giveaways such as platforms or model shorter trains instead.

Posted in: Rolling stock

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