Can I have a stub-ended interchange yard where both RRs use same yard throat to enter and leave scene ? If so, I can then justify 'other RR's engine pulling cars into yard for us, then running around them in reverse and departing scene through same throat onto his main line toward from where he came, say, caboose light or with cars we'd set out for him .....Mark
Not exactly "stub ended" but it operated in much the way you described, with interchanges between THREE trunkline railroads: Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Texas Mexican, AND the Port switching railroad in Corpus Christi ca 1960-2000. Transfer yard was on the north side of the ship channel, reached by all three trunklines from the south over a vertical lift bridge. Each railroad took cars to be interchanged to this yard and picked its own up. I show green for TexMex, brown for cars destined to port RR, orange for SP and blue for MoPac. The green loco (TexMex) has 3 cars for the port and 1 for MoPac. He pulls past the far end, sorts them into proper tracks and then runs around to pull his own cars. CCTA transfer yrd Tule Lake lift bridge with transfer run nbound
KA, thanks for great reply, diagram and pictures. I think what you you're saying is all tracks on north side , from bulk materials to molasses tanks (west to east) in a way make up one huge stub end transfer because, although the TRR yard is a through yard , this is only to allow a drill track and to sort cars where trains still wind up reversing direction and going back over lift bridge. Baroid oil well mud to pipe wrapping, grain, cement, molasses, cargo docks are not transfers, but 'private' yards. Thus entire north trackage equals one big stub end as red trackage doesn't continue on as a, say, main line to the north east. All cars eventually must go back over bridge. Correct ?
Right. Everything north side was a port-related switching district with multiple industry spurs. Set-up was in part a reaction to situations left over from pre-1959. Before 1959, Southern Pacific came into town from the north, served port industries along the north side of the channel, and crossed the throat of the harbor on a bascule drawbridge. The bridge was a bottleneck to rail, auto, truck AND ship traffic. When it was replaced by a high-level bridge, SP track from north was abandoned and SP got trackage rights to run into Corpus Christi over Missouri Pacific tracks, and it helped Tex Mex Rwy build a larger yard ("Joint Yard") which it shared.
Yeah, so I did savvy the situation. So, very final east end of red at one time was an SP main from north rendering it at the time to be a 'through' yard continuing south over bridge. Still, I'd like someone to verify if any end-of-the-line dead end stub yards do or did have 2 or more RRs passing cars off to one another right within say 4-6 stub tracks, no turning facility, just runarounds forward or backwards out of yard . Thanks, Mark
Not quite. When final east end of red line north side of port connected to orange SP line before 1959, there was NO lift bridge near west end of red line, and no "connecting track" to TexMex yard. All of the tracks north of the channel were port-related industrial spurs, with no through traffic moving on them. They connected to SP. SP did not have any yard on north side of orange draw bridge. SP yard came into town from north over drawbridge and had its yard on south side of drawbridge, its passenger depot just a couple of hundred feet from the MP depot (which is marked "old depot" on above schematic). And SP had a turning wye for locomotives on north side of drawbridge with tail of the wye running out onto a pier over the beach. SP's yard on southside of Port pre-1959 was stub-ended as far as SP went-- no main track beyond there. But track continued to connection to port tracks, to MP and TexMex and interchanged with them.
