There have been several articles I can remember reading that had photos of those Hump Yard pits. It took three men to man them as there was a pit on each side and one under the track with glass view ports and lights for 24 hour operations. As far as the car shops having pits some did though not all. When one considers the amount of equipment and plumbing that hangs under some passenger cars it makes sense for shops handling those to have one. Not to mention freight cars also.
The file trick worked great! :thumbs_up: Thanks for the tip. biggrin: That must have been in the old days. I watched the Barstow Classification Hump yard in operation and although I wasn’t aware of pits at the time and not looking for them, those cars were moving pretty fast. The operator sat inside what looked like a toll booth and looked pretty busy. I don’t know if anybody in a pit would have time to do anything. I do have a small Hump yard on my layout and had I known about pits being used I might have put it there, but it’s way too late for that now.
Excellent, glad to help. That's why I like the Peco Code 55 track. That extra bit of metal makes it sit more firmly in the plastic ties, and makes it very easy to transition to/from Code 80. OK, now get-er-done!
And you're right, until you have to get one off the car. How do you loosen it, without dropping it in the pit? Lay on the skid it's going to land on?
One way is tall jackstands in the pits. Also there were some steel plates, not the pit covers, that slid along recesses in the pit walls. Held tools and parts. A good publication that gives some interesting drawings and photos of various shops is Train Shed Cyclopedia No. 85. There were some pits that had side galleries or under floor work areas adjacent to the main pit between the rails. Easy matter then to simply slide the offending part to the side and onto a wheeled metal cart where it could then be wheeled to an opening and lifted out of the pit.
If you visited that hump yard in the last 20 years, you might not have notices the inspection pits. The are not man sized any more. Now they only need to fit a camera. Two of those three guys have lost their jobs and a single guy sits in a shack and looks at all three monitors at once. If you've ever work under a car for any period of time you'd rather be standing than lying.
The funny thing is that I have been in that area once or twice a month for almost 20 years and I only discovered the hump yard 2 or 3 years ago by accident. I wanted to build a hump yard about 5 years ago and everybody told me at another site that there were no more hump yards in the US and that it would not work for a model railroad especially N scale. I gave up on the whole idea until I saw the one in Barstow. I was so socked to see it that took me awhile to believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t until I drove almost to the booth where the operator was that I realized that I had been told wrong. I took a couple of photos with my phone camera and had planed to go back on the weekend with my wife and take more photos, but I was warned that I had gone much to close and I was very lucky that I wasn’t arrested. i just search my computer for the photos, but can't find them. I guess I'll have to take a chance and take some morebiggrin:
I believe that there used to be close to about 172 hump yards in 1975 and today that number is down to about 50 or maybe less. Reason for the demise is attributed to the increase in intermodal and unit trains plus a few other factors. RF&P Potomac Yard used to be one of the big ones in my area until about 1990 or so. Alas it is gone now and a danged mall sits there.
And man do I miss that yard. That and Southern's little yard and engine shop in Alexandria were some of my favorite places to visit.
One of the primary reasons for pits is inspection, not repairs. You need to get under locomotives regularly. Traction motors are next to impossible to inspect without a pit. There's not a whole lot necessarily under a freight car that has to be inspected from underneath; most inspection issues can be reached from crawling underneath. On passenger cars, the brake rigging in particular, and in my experience - disc brakes - wow, is it easier if you have a pit. On humps you're looking underneath for broken brake rigging, dangling stuff, loose stuff. As far as for humps, as hard as railroads have tried to kill them, they refuse to die. NS has Enola running again, and CSXT has been discussing reopening Frontier Yard in Buffalo. I got the $500 tour of the new J. R. Davis yard on UP in Sacramento three years ago, and reports of any hump yard demise are greatly exaggerated. It's incredible, and dispite my personal distaste for most things UP, I was very impressed.
For Humps beignm dead, the one in Avon does a nice job of tieing up traffic drilling cars, and shall I mention Galeburg? RE: Car brakes: I know that the old Heavyweights are pains, I've never watched a Disc Brake get changed, ut when we do the brakes on the Budd coaches (1937) they pull the in and let it fall tot he ground, from outside of the truck. Much better without the pit.
BN used to inspect sections of their "Trough Train" at the diesel pit in Alliance NE. It was easier than running it through the carshop. Too many inspection points and it couldn't be jacked up easily.......
