The Inglenook Shunting Puzzle - Pickwick Yard - 00 Gauge Model Railway Layout

The Inglenook Shunting Puzzle on Pickwick Yard my 00 Gauge Model Railway.

Today's running session is one with a bit of a twist. The Inglenook Shunting Puzzle is a shunting game you can play with your layout that requires you to shunt wagons into a randomly selected order before a train can be dispatched. It's great for micro layouts and small shunting layouts like mine since you only need three sidings and a few wagons and it adds a real purpose to the shunting on your layout.

In this video I quickly explain all the rules (repeated below) before doing a very quick demonstration to show you how it all works in practice. Some people like to treat this purely as a puzzle that has to be solved as quickly as possible or others like to use it to add a bit of variation into their operating sessions and realistically shunt a train into whatever order is required. Either way it's great fun that definitely keeps you occupied!

The Inglenook Shunting Puzzle:
With 8 wagons on your layout, choose 5 at random to be shunted into a train in the order specified. (Fewer wagons can be used to make the puzzle easier!)

The Rules:
-Only use one loco.
-Wagons must be selected at random. Either use cards as demonstrated in the video or assign each wagon a number and use a random number generator.
-Wagons must be shunted into the same order as specified when selected.
-You are allowed to use three sidings to shunt your wagons. Two of these can hold three wagons at maximum while the third siding is allowed to hold five.
-The headshunt can hold your loco and three wagons at maximum.

Some people choose to build their own Inglenook Sidings layout that matches these rules (ie: only three sidings, sidings only long enough to hold three or five wagons, etc) but you can also use your own layout and play using honour rules like I'm doing. The sidings on Pickwick Yard for example can hold more than three wagons but to play the puzzle properly I still stick the rules.

You can also remove wagons from the layout to make things easier. For example I only use seven in the video to make the puzzle easier to solve and definitely not because I forgot I needed to use eight wagons! In the meantime, I do hope you enjoy this video and let me know if you give this a try on your own layout.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:51 - The Rules
02:59 - Demonstration
10:08 - Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Thanks for watching!