Timesaver

Timesaver is a model railroad switching puzzle created by the American model railroader John Allen and first published in the November 1972 issue of Model Railroader magazine, in what turned out to be his final article before his death the following year. The puzzle is built around a compact yard containing five switches, three of them lefthand and two righthand, along with five spurs and a runaround track at the center of the layout, all fitted into a small footprint. A single locomotive runs at a fixed slow speed, controlled through a reversible power switch, while players move a set of freight cars from their starting spots to clearly marked destination tracks using only the available switches. In its original competitive form, players are timed, and the thinking time spent planning a move counts exactly the same as the time spent physically moving cars, which rewards careful planning as much as manual skill. Two Timesaver layouts can also be joined by an interchange track to create a cooperative version in which two operators exchange cars with one another, and the puzzle is small enough to be built into a corner of a larger model railroad layout to add a switching challenge.