The Analog Outage Train Model Workshop: Building a Tabletop Railway of Failure Paths

When your systems go down, you don’t want your outage plan to be a theoretical document that nobody has really tested. You want a team that has practiced, together, under pressure. That’s where the Analog Outage Train Model comes in: a low‑tech, high‑impact workshop that uses paper tracks and wooden blocks to simulate complex failure paths on a tabletop.

It looks playful. It’s anything but. Behind the toy‑train aesthetic is a powerful method for stress‑testing your policies, procedures, and people.

In this post, we’ll walk through what the Analog Outage Train Model is, how it works, and why running these tabletop exercises can dramatically improve your real‑world outage response.

What Is the Analog Outage Train Model?

The Analog Outage Train Model is a tabletop outage exercise format where:

Paper tracks represent systems, services, and dependency paths.
Switches and junctions represent decisions, escalation points, or branching incident paths.
Wooden blocks or train cars represent events, failures, alerts, tickets, or work items.
Stations and depots represent teams, tools, or critical infrastructure components.

Instead of staring at dashboards or diagrams, participants physically move blocks along tracks that represent the flow of an incident: detection, triage, communication, remediation, and recovery.

It’s intentionally analog. No special software. No complex simulation engine. Just a shared physical model that makes the invisible parts of outage response visible.

Why Go Analog for Outage Simulation?

Organizations often rely on abstract assets when planning for outages:

ER diagrams and architecture diagrams
RACI charts and org charts
Runbooks and playbooks
Ticket workflows and process docs

These are useful, but they describe an idealized world. Real incidents never follow the blueprint perfectly.

The Analog Outage Train Model acts as a practical complement to those abstractions by forcing you to walk through:

Concrete events: “This API fails. This alert fires. This customer calls.”
Real decisions: “Who gets paged? Who approves this change? Who talks to the CEO?”
Actual workflows: “What tools do we use? What steps do we skip under pressure?”

Instead of debating hypotheticals, you play out real scenarios and see how your plans perform when turned into physical flows.

Inside the Workshop: How the Exercise Works

While every organization can customize the format, a typical Analog Outage Train Model workshop follows a pattern.

1. Build the Railway of Your System

The group starts by mapping critical parts of the environment onto the table:

Tracks for key services and their dependencies (e.g., auth, payment processing, logging, messaging).
Branches and switches for alternate paths (e.g., failover regions, backup systems, manual workarounds).
Stations for teams and tools (e.g., SRE, security, customer support, incident commander, change management system, ticketing system).

You don’t model every microservice. You model what matters for major incidents: the services that break often, or that cause severe impact when they do.

2. Place the Trains: Define Failure Scenarios

Next, you create one or more outage scenarios, represented by train cars or wooden blocks:

A database cluster becomes read‑only.
An authentication provider starts timing out.
A deployment breaks the checkout flow for some regions.
Observability tools themselves are degraded.

Each scenario is given a starting point on the tracks and a target destination that represents either successful recovery or catastrophic impact.

3. Play Through the Incident

Participants assume their real roles (or realistic proxies):

Incident Commander
On‑call engineers (SRE, platform, app teams)
Security
Customer support and success
Communications/PR
Product or business stakeholders

The facilitator introduces the first failure event. The group must decide:

What happens first? Who sees what?
Which track does the train move to next? (Which team, which system, which tool?)
What decision is made at each junction?

Every decision moves the block along the tracks. If someone says, “Support opens a ticket in the incident system,” the block moves from the Customer Reports track to the Incident Management station.

The scene moves step‑by‑step, like a physical flowchart under stress.

4. Capture Reality, Not Aspirations

The crucial rule: participants must describe what they would actually do today, not what they wish they did. That’s where the insights come from.

As the train moves, the facilitator asks:

“Which specific tool do you use for that?”
“Who owns this decision?”
“Where is that documented?”
“What if that person is on vacation?”

Every ambiguity, delay, or confusion is noted. If the group gets stuck, the train stalls on the table — a powerful visual cue that your current process would stall in real life too.

What These Simulations Reveal Under Stress

Running the Analog Outage Train Model frequently uncovers issues that look fine on paper but fall apart in motion.

1. Policy and Procedure Breakdowns

Your incident handbook might say:

“In the event of a severity‑1 incident, the incident commander will assemble the response team and initiate the communication protocol.”

During the exercise, you might discover:

Nobody knows who is incident commander for this particular domain.
The communication template is out of date or hard to find.
The escalation path assumes a tool that only some people have access to.

The model surfaces the difference between policy as written and policy as actually executable.

2. Hidden Gaps in Team Assignments and Coordination

The physical movement of blocks makes organizational issues painfully clear:

The train bounces between two stations because no team has true ownership for a component.
Certain team tracks are constantly overloaded, revealing chronic bottlenecks.
Cross‑functional steps (e.g., security review, legal approval) are completely missing from the track layout.

These gaps rarely show up in static documentation, but they emerge quickly when a scenario unfolds in real time.

3. Communication Failures in Motion

The workshop often exposes subtle but serious communication problems:

Support doesn’t know how to get rapid technical updates during an outage.
Engineers aren’t sure what they have permission to tell customers.
Business stakeholders lack a clear channel to get reliable status without disrupting responders.

By forcing every message and escalation to be represented as a movement along the tracks, the model highlights where communication loops are slow, duplicated, or simply missing.

4. Weak or Ineffective Remediation Tools

You also see where your tools fail you:

Runbooks that are outdated, incomplete, or too long to be useful mid‑incident.
Dashboards that don’t answer the questions responders actually ask.
Automation that exists in theory but is rarely trusted or used.

Because the team must declare which tools they would use at each step, the gaps stand out. The result is concrete direction for what needs to be fixed, simplified, or upgraded in your toolchain.

Turning Insights Into Action: Iteration and Hardening

The goal of the Analog Outage Train Model isn’t just to expose problems. It’s to iterate and improve.

1. Debrief and Document

After the run‑through, the team holds a structured debrief:

What slowed us down?
Where did responsibilities get fuzzy?
Which tools failed us or didn’t exist?
Which decisions were made too late or by the wrong people?

These observations feed into a prioritized backlog of improvements: from documentation fixes to team ownership changes to tooling enhancements.

2. Redraw the Tracks

Once changes are agreed on, you update the model itself:

Add or rename stations as ownership becomes clearer.
Create new branches for better failover or manual processes.
Mark deprecated or risky paths that should be avoided.

The physical layout becomes a living representation of your current best understanding of how incidents should flow.

3. Re‑run and Retest

The real power comes from running multiple iterations over time:

Re‑run the same scenario after changes to see if the train moves more smoothly.
Introduce new failure paths (e.g., concurrent incidents, tool outages, or data integrity issues).
Rotate participants to train more people in the updated process.

Each iteration hardens your outage response. You’re not just writing a better plan; you’re proving it works with the people who will actually use it.

Training a Cohesive Incident Response Team

Beyond process and tools, the Analog Outage Train Model is fundamentally about people.

Building Technical and Collaborative Muscle Memory

Responders practice:

Coordinating across engineering, support, security, and business roles.
Making decisions under time pressure with partial information.
Using communication channels and tools as they would in a real event.

Over time, this builds muscle memory — not just technically (“What commands do I run?”) but socially (“Who do I loop in, and how?”).

Creating Shared Understanding and Trust

Having everyone see the same tracks and move the same blocks fosters a shared mental model:

Engineers understand what support and PR need to protect customers and brand.
Support understands why engineers need room to troubleshoot.
Leadership sees why certain trade‑offs are made at specific times.

This shared understanding reduces friction and finger‑pointing when an actual outage occurs. The team feels like one coordinated unit rather than a set of siloed functions.

Conclusion: A Simple Model With Serious Impact

The Analog Outage Train Model looks deceptively simple: paper tracks, wooden blocks, and a group of people gathered around a table. In practice, it’s a powerful way to:

Safely simulate real failure paths.
Watch your policies and procedures operate under simulated stress.
Reveal gaps in assignments, communication, and coordination.
Identify ineffective tools and missing remediation capabilities.
Complement abstract models with concrete, event‑driven workflows.
Iterate, retest, and steadily harden your outage response.
Train responders as a cohesive, cross‑functional team.

In an era filled with complex tooling and automation, sometimes the most effective way to understand your system — and your organization — is to slow down, go analog, and watch the trains run.

If you rely on digital infrastructure for your business, consider building a tabletop railway of your own. The insights you uncover before the next big outage may be worth far more than the cost of some paper tracks and wooden blocks.