UPDATE
I've now got a midpoint station design that uses two tracks at a single level (although with some buried wiring) that can be strung together in a line, that uses simple flow control, so that main lines are restricted to one cart at a time heading in one direction, and multiple carts in the system can run simultaneously with an ideal number of carts being the total number of stations (terminals or midpoint) minus one.
Below is the original article, written before the above video was made.
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Model Railroading-- at least the construction, electrical, and operational aspects, if not the aesthetic ones-- lives on in spirit through the popular video game Minecraft.
What Is Minecraft?
A game for PCs, Macs and Microsoft's Xbox console, Minecraft's appearance is deliberately primitive. Players in Minecraft inhabit a world comprised of cubes that appear to be about a meter on each side. Each cube's appearance lets the player know what material they are composed of: earth, stone, sand, wood, water, etc. Many of these materials can be "mined" by the player for their constituent resources, and reformed into useful tools, building materials, and structures.
Each Minecraft world consists of randomly-generated terrain composed of these blocks, placed together to form plains, deserts, forests, oceans, rivers, lakes, mountains and underground caves.
In its basic mode, called survival, players are dropped into a world and must start from scratch, harvesting wood to make wooden tools, then moving on to harvesting stone and metal ores to make better and better tools in order to make larger and more complex structures. The motivation to make these structures is what happens when it gets dark: the world spawns monsters of various types in dark areas that will roam the world and attack the player if they see him. Torches produce light that stops monsters from appearing nearby, and discourages their approach; walls of earth, wood and stone will keep them out (don't forget the ceiling, some can climb walls!), door mechanisms will let you come and go while monsters are kept out, and weapons can be used to fight them and even harvest certain resources from them.
The game's name aptly points out its focus: mining in minecraft is how you acquire more resources that allow you to improve your tools, replace them when they wear out, and provide raw materials to build houses, towns, cities, or castles: whatever the player can dream up.
