Apadobe Mine is a small Inglenook shunting puzzle built inside an APA toy box.

The mine is located somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico in the USA and it features some of the things I associate with those areas: an Adobe building, a wooden water tower and reddish rocks. Perhaps, it’s a stereotypical rather than a prototypical view!

The layout is built in O scale on 9mm gauge track and represents an 18 inch (450mm) gauge narrow gauge railway. This scale is called O9 in England and On18 in the USA. The scenic area is 650 x 300 mm (25.5 x 12 inches).

Pictures of the Layout (Click on a photo for a larger image).

The Shunting Puzzle

The layout is a classic Inglenook shunting puzzle, where the longest siding (the front of the loop) holds five wagons, the other sidings hold three wagons, and the headshunt holds the loco and three wagons. There is a card for each wagon, five cards are chosen at random and the operator has to assemble a train with the five wagons in the correct order. Apparently there are 6,720 different arrangements for the five wagons in the consist.

The mine tubs contain nuggets of gold or silver (cat litter granules with a dash of paint), diamonds or rubies (the ‘crystal diamante gems’ used by crafters). There’s a wagon with very large tins of soup (think Andy Warhol), a tanker of Coors beer, an explosives van and a flat wagon with some spares. Yes, I’m having a little fun here! (Click on a photo for a larger image).

Full Details of the Layout Build

You can read about building the layout here: https://009adventure.blog/category/layout-apadobe-mine/

Apadobe Mine in Print

This layout has appeared in Narrow Lines (the magazine of the 7mm Narrow Gauge Association, June 2023) and Continental Modeller (November 2023).