Hello fellow Model Railroaders!! It looks as though on my layout that I am building, I may have room for a downtown industrial district. I plan to have trains picking up and delivering cars to a multitude of warehouses. My question is: with all the tracks that run between warehouses, how are street (and other track) crossings protected? Are only crossing signs used? Is a flagman needed? Are signals (flashing lights / bells) used? Or are there any signs at all? Here in Denver, most of the tracks in the warehouse district is paved over or not used anymore. I have not been lucky trying to find pictures of RR crossings in industrial districts. Any help will be appreciated. I am modeling the early to mid 1970's. Thank you Cary Hewitt President and CEO, Alpine Pacific RY.
I'm no expert, but... Sometimes they will just have a flagman block traffic, or use a fusee (signal flare) lit and tossed in the middle of the street. Fusees can be modeled using a campfire circuit and a red LED...
I'm modeling the same basic thing (loosely based on the Bush Terminal Railroad in Brooklyn, NY) and they used flag men. Someone would ride on the platform and, when needed, down he went and flagged the street so the locomotive could do it's job. Sometimes even a police officer would be there to help out. Here are some pics (from the Bush Terminal page at the INDUSTRIAL & OFFLINE TERMINAL RAILROADS OF BROOKLYN, QUEENS, STATEN ISLAND, BRONX & MANHATTAN website: Mostly though, they just proceeded slowly with lights and bell on, using the horn as necessary.
Cary how about something like this........ http://www.youtube.com/user/LanceMindheim#p/u/4/IJabUpX_ovc A little more modern than you I'll grant you but it's a good visual ratled
Industrial areas are slow speed areas therefore the conductor or brakeman would flag the crossing..In some areas that invovles short street runing a brakeman may walk ahead of the train for flag protection.
Up until the 60's (possibly the 70's) a lot of yard jobs had a 4 man crew two of whom would often be "on the ground" with flags. That, in combination with fusees, noise, and typical slow speeds of both autos and locos kept things pretty safe. For years back in the 60's I watched 4 different railroads switch the east side of Charleston and all used typically these same tactics.
This is a bit more modern, but this is a different crossing protection.....and prototypical! http://sopacincg.com/stop-signs-for-trains/
Model Railroader magazine had an article on this last year. If you subscribe to the magazine, you can probably read the article online. Otherwise, find that issue at the library or something. Short answer is the fusee (flares), as stated above. The article goes into more details about how you'd actually model that, and what protocols the trains use to protect the intersection, etc.
Ratled: the clock in the video is out of scale. Seriously though; I enjoyed the video, and the work on the buildings is awesome! John
In the Bayshore district in San Francisco there is a spot where the train runs down a street for about three blocks on its way to a closed off yard. The track comes through an auto-junkyard and curves onto the street from the corner of the intersection. That intersection has crossing signals on three sides, but there are no gates. I have never seen a crew member flag the operation, although speeds are only about 10mph and they lay on the horn. At the other end of the same street, the track curves behind a kind of sidewalk island, and I believe there's another crossing signal, and then the track crosses a four lane street (including a light rail line!), also with crossing signals but no gates. There are interlocking signals for the light rail line, and the traffic signals all go red at this spot when the train approaches. I have seen a clueless truck driver sit on the tracks for five minutes while the train blew its horn the whole time because there was a red light in front of him and, well, he was clueless. How do you model that?
