- Baseboard
- The rigid platform a layout is built on — plywood, foam, or a mix of both, cut to fit the space and usually built in sections so it can move house if you do.
- Benchwork
- The structural framing underneath a baseboard — legs, cross-braces and supports. Good benchwork stays level and quiet; bad benchwork telegraphs every footstep into the track.
- Consist
- The specific set of cars or wagons made up for one train movement. A "consist" changes trip to trip, even if the locomotive stays the same.
- Departure board
- A physical or printed board listing scheduled movements for a session — which train leaves which location and roughly when, used to keep an operating session on track.
- Fiddle yard
- An off-scene storage area, usually a set of parallel tracks, where trains are held or swapped out before re-entering the visible layout. It rarely appears in photographs but does most of the work.
- Gauge
- The distance between the two rails of a track. Gauge and scale are related but not the same thing — two scales can share a gauge, and one scale can be modeled in more than one gauge.
- Headshunt
- A short stub of track at the end of a yard or siding, long enough for a locomotive to run around a cut of wagons without fouling the main line. Easy to skip when space is tight, and missed immediately when it is.
- Interchange
- A point where two operators, or two notional railways, hand traffic to each other — useful on a small layout as an excuse to bring "foreign" stock onto your own line.
- Kickback siding
- A siding reached by reversing direction through a facing point — visually interesting, operationally slower, and worth including sparingly rather than everywhere.
- Layout
- The general term for the whole model railway — benchwork, track, scenery and structures together, as opposed to any one part of it.
- Local
- A train that stops at every station along its route, as opposed to a through service. Locals are a reliable way to give a small layout something to do every few minutes.
- Main line
- The principal running track a layout is built around, as distinct from sidings, yards and branches that feed off it.
- Marshalling yard
- A set of parallel sidings used to sort wagons into new consists by destination — the busiest single feature on a layout built around freight operation.
- Operating session
- A planned period of running a layout against a timetable or switch list, rather than simply watching trains circulate. Most of what Trackplan writes about assumes a layout is meant to be operated, not just watched.
- Point (turnout)
- The movable piece of track that lets a train diverge from one route onto another. "Point" is the more common British term; "turnout" the more common North American one.
- Radius
- The tightness of a curve, usually given in millimeters or inches. Smaller radius saves space but limits which locomotives and cars will run through it reliably.
- Ruling grade
- The steepest sustained gradient anywhere on a layout, since it — not the average grade — determines the longest train a locomotive can pull over the whole route.
- Scenic break
- A tunnel mouth, bridge, or building placed to visually separate one section of a layout from another, so a small space reads as more than one place.
- Session card
- A single card summarizing one operator's jobs for a session — the pickups, set-outs and moves assigned to their location, drawn from the wider timetable.
- Siding
- A short section of track off the main line, used for storing, loading or sorting cars. A siding with no operational purpose is usually just scenery with a name.
- Staging yard
- Another name for a fiddle yard, more common in North American usage — off-scene tracks that represent the rest of the railway beyond the visible layout.
- Switch list
- A written list of the pickups and set-outs required at one location, compiled from the session's overall plan so an operator can work a yard without needing the whole timetable in front of them.
- Timetable
- A schedule assigning specific trains to specific times, giving an operating session structure and a sense of pace rather than open-ended running.
- Turnback
- A loop or crossover arrangement that lets a train reverse direction and head back the way it came, often used to extend a run in a small space without a second visible line.
- Wye
- A triangular arrangement of track used to reverse the direction a whole train faces, rather than just its direction of travel — useful, if space-hungry, on a point-to-point layout.