The Timesaver Puzzle: John Allen’s Switching Layout, Rules and Track Plan

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The Timesaver is a model railroad switching puzzle by John Allen: five cars, five turnouts, a short runaround in the middle and spurs at the corners, and your job is to spot every car at its marked destination using only the locomotive. It was first published in Model Railroader in November 1972, and it is famous for being frustrating in the best possible way.

The Timesaver track plan

The Timesaver has “five switches (three lefthand, two righthand), five spurs, and a runaround track at the center” (Wikipedia, Timesaver). Adrian Wymann, who has documented the puzzle in detail, notes that John Allen’s original used Y switches and was “conceived to work with five 40ft freight cars and 1 short switcher”.

The trick is in the lengths. The runaround is short, the spurs are short, and one spur faces the opposite way to the others, so a car can only be pushed into it from one end of the runaround. Wymann gives a rule for the overall length: six times the length of the longest piece of rolling stock, plus the length of two points, and he stresses that the siding lengths “must be strictly observed”. Make them longer and the puzzle loses its bite.

The Timesaver rules and the scoring

The original game, as Wymann sets it out, is simple to state: five cars stand on the layout, each is given a destination, and you switch all five to their destinations. Wikipedia puts the object as moving them “to clearly marked destination positions”.

• Scoring by time (the original). Complete the switching as quickly as possible; the shortest time wins. The locomotive runs at a fixed slow speed through a centre-off reversing switch (Wikipedia), so you cannot win by driving fast, and accidents such as derailments earn a time penalty (Wymann).
• Thinking counts. Time spent thinking counts the same as time spent moving cars, and the number of moves does not matter (Wikipedia).
• Scoring by moves (a common modern rule). Complete the switching in as few moves as possible, with no clock (Wymann’s modified rule A2). It suits solo play, and it is what our online version uses.
• Only the locomotive moves cars. As with the Inglenook, no hand of God; cars couple on contact and are uncoupled by hand. No car may be left on the points.

Allen’s layout was a pure game board: “no scenery or decoration of any kind”, with industries simply shown by markers beside the track (Wymann).

How to play the Timesaver, step by step

1. Place the cars. Put five cars on the layout at random, and the locomotive on the lead.
2. Give each car a destination. Mark five spots beside the spurs and assign each car one at random, with cards or numbered slips. There are 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 120 ways to pair five cars with five spots.
3. Find the awkward car first. The car bound for the spur that faces the other way usually decides the order of the whole job. Work out how you will get the locomotive to the right side of it.
4. Use the runaround. Pull cars onto the runaround, run the locomotive around them, and push them from the other end. With such a short runaround you can only do this with one or two cars at a time.
5. Clear spurs as you go. A spur with a car that belongs elsewhere is a blocked spur. Park unwanted cars where they will not be in the way of the next placement.
6. Spot each car exactly. A car is placed when it stands at its marked spot, uncoupled. When all five are spotted, stop the clock or count your moves.

Why the Timesaver is so hard

• The facing spur. On a plain siding you push a car in. On the spur that faces the other way you have to come at it from the far end, which means getting the car onto the runaround and the locomotive around it first.
• A runaround that is too short. It holds only a couple of cars, so long cuts must be broken up before you can run around them.
• Spurs that double as storage. There is nowhere else to put a car that is in the way, so every spur is both a destination and a parking place.
• Every move costs. With time scoring, a pointless move costs time twice: once to make it and once to undo it.

Unlike the Inglenook, where we could solve every deal exactly (see the Inglenook maths), a full fewest-moves search of a Timesaver yard did not finish in minutes on our hardware, which is a fair measure of how much bigger its puzzle space is.

Timesaver or Inglenook? The difference

Both are covered in our shunting puzzles guide.

Timesaver variations and micro Timesavers

Two Timesavers and an interchange

Two layouts can be joined by an unpowered interchange track, which adds a sixth switch to each and room for one car. The game then becomes co-operative, with players exchanging outbound cars (Wikipedia).

The Micro TymeSaver

Carl Arendt drew a smaller, simpler version he called the Micro TymeSaver, devoted to distributing and picking up cars at industrial sidings, with a stub siding reaching backstage for “fiddling by the 0-5-0 switcher”, the hand (Micro TymeSaver Designs).

The Timewaster and a 9 × 54 inch Timesaver

Emrys Hopkins’s Timewaster, for HO and OO, is 60 inches long and 9 wide, 540 square inches in all. He also adapted John Allen’s original to a track geometry that fits an HO Timesaver onto a 9 × 54 inch (23 × 137 cm) bookshelf using standard Peco turnouts (Micro TymeSaver Designs).

In big scales

Bill Cooke’s Hedgehog Hill Estates Railway, a winery line in 7/8-inch scale (1:13.7), uses a Timesaver-type switching layout on its upper level (Micro TymeSaver Designs). The same idea in On2 would be a fraction of the size.

Building a Timesaver

• Choose your cars first and size every spur and the runaround in car lengths, because the capacities are the puzzle. Wymann’s rule of six car lengths plus two points gives the overall length.
• Snap track works. Russ Cain, a member of John Allen’s Gorre & Daphetid operating crew, described building a Timesaver from standard snap-track and Kadee couplers in Model Railroader, October 1976 (Wymann).
• Slow, steady running. Allen’s fixed slow speed through a centre-off switch keeps the game fair and gentle on couplers.
• Clear destination markers. Mark the five spots so there is no argument about when a car is placed.

For more small switching ideas see Carl Arendt’s Runarounds and Layouts for Operation, and our small layouts guide.

History of the Timesaver

The Timesaver was “conceived and built by ‘the wizard of Monterey’, famous US modeller John Whitby Allen (1913–1973)” and introduced in the November 1972 issue of Model Railroader, “in the last article John Allen wrote” (Wymann). Allen himself observed that occasionally a product “proves better than hoped for”. The original article is in the Internet Archive’s copy of Model Railroader, November 1972, from page 66. Carl Arendt wrote that the idea “has been duplicated in literally hundreds of layouts” (Micro TymeSaver Designs).

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Timesaver“, read 14 October 2026.
2. Adrian Wymann, “The Timesaver“, “Rules” and “Track plan“, wymann.info.
3. John Allen, Model Railroader, November 1972, Internet Archive copy.
4. Carl Arendt, “Micro TymeSaver Designs“, Micro Layout Design Gallery, carendt.com.