Yard Design 10 Rules: http://www.housatonicrr.com/yard_des.html very good intro.

        Somewhat unrelated, very interesting read on Housatonic Railroad Design Philosophy.

Tips of Freight Yard design: http://www.featherrivertrains.com/documents/kal_12248.pdf

Yard Operations and Design: https://www.x2011west.org/handouts/ldBootcamp-YardOps.pdf

Many LayoutVision pages relevant: http://www.layoutvision.com/id18.html 

        Love for the yard: http://www.layoutvision.com/id19.html 

        How to classification yard: http://www.layoutvision.com/id20.html

        Ops on a classic 4x8: http://www.layoutvision.com/id39.html

        Beware of CAD: http://www.layoutvision.com/id40.html (agreed on the S curves!)

Interesting design. Note that according to LayoutVison, typical west yards don't have an A/D.

Since I have IR reflective sensors, the idea would be to connect them to an NCE AIU01 to detect position in 2 or 3 spots for speed control and automation.

(Also I got an NCE Q-Snap to control 4 twin-coils, This would cover the front cross-over (2 turnouts), the yard entrance Y1 and the Y1/Y2 yard turnout. Really the point is learning and see what it’s good for since I can already control these turnouts with the Arduino/DigiX).

One idea is for speed matching, using one NCE AIU and 2 sensors.

• Embed the sensors in the EZTrack pointing up rather than side mounted.
• Use these directly using JMRI/jython.
• This leaves 12 unused inputs on the AIU.

This is my own understanding of the JMRI WiThrottle protocol based on reading the JMRI source code and connecting to a local JMRI server. I apologize in advance for the highly condensed notation style. I originally started looking into this to create my own python program; then back in 2014/2015 I used this  to create a Python extension of Scratch running on a Raspberry Pi to control JMRI. It was pointless yet it was absolutely cool and totally worth it. Eventually I used that same information to create my own Cab Engineer: DCC Throttle android app.

-- (start of info dump) --

JRMI WiThrottle protocol in action using [WiThrottle protocol doc].

Server code:

• DeviceServer.java for main codes (old sourceforge link: DeviceServer.java).
• ThrottleController.java for single throttle (T and S codes) (old sourceforge link: ThrottleController.java):

[2020 update: code now at https://github.com/JMRI/JMRI. Also note that all T/S throttle commands are now considered obsolete, using the MT multi-throttle commands is pretty much a given.]