I had a member on another forum draw up a plan for me last winter for my available space and asked him to fill it with track and industry. I built the bench work and started to lay track but over the past couple weeks I have been spending a lot of time looking at Industrial Switching Layouts where the less is more approach is used. My room is 12'.5'' x 8'.5'' and the bench work is 2' W and 12''.5'' L x 6' W across the top and 8' on the peninsula. This is what I was going to do I would like to simplify things and go with 4-5 businesses with a couple of sidings for trans load operation/team track. It would be nice to have a small yard to store cars for the industry's as well as a loco service track for say two units and maybe a caboose. I think the 12'5" wall would be great for some building flats. - single person operation - four axle ALCO's for power - single or two units for switching - can do standard, push/pull or use a shoving platform - 50' - 65' cars - set in eastern Canada in the 1990- 2000 time frame - branch line or industrial park - thinking a fall setting Industry's I like - pulp loading/unloading - sand/gravel unloading ( I have a Walthers Rail to road aggregate transfer kit http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-4036 ) - propane dealer (have Walthers kit and two extra tanks) - grain elevator - scrap dealer - pipe manufacturer - distributor receiving box cars or reefers - plastic pellet transfer or business using them (Have Walthers kit) I would like to use my track and switches that I have on hand which are medium Peco switches and Atlas code 100 flextrack. Any help, plans or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I'm in N but I'm going to wade in (maybe over my head) and throw in a couple of suggestions. In general, this is a great "railroady-looking" layout. It seems the switching lead from your yard tracks are not quite long enough to pull at once all the cars that might be on classification tracks. Since you are apparently not running "through" trains, you don't REALLY need to keep the mainline clear. But it would be more railroadlike to provide enough switch lead to switch the yard track efficiently without fouling the main. One way to do it would be to have a lead that joins the "main" halfway around the left end turnback curve, instead of where it joins as the turnback curve straightens out at the bottom of the plan. 2nd: I would try to work in an interchange track somewhere, where your road swaps cars with another road. Conceivably one of the tracks you already show could be operated as an interchange. 3rd: If you could have a staging track, even a dead end track, on the opposite side of the layout from your yard, that would provide an opportunity for a train to come from "somewhere else", deliver cars to your yard and later return to dead end on that track as if "going somewhere else." That train would have to be fiddled with by hand between operating sessions.
In the upper left hand corner where you have a siding along warehouse(maybe?) with a switch back to another siding... just to warn you... that will get old real quick. From your plan(and it could not be scale) it looks like the very left siding would have to be empty in order to switch the right siding behind the switch. I had something similar on my layout... and after about a year... I had enough. Ripped it out and made a switch to each siding from the main... JMHO. JMS
Agree. There are actually a couple of places like that on the plan. Eliminating them would simplify and get rid of an unprototypical feature. http://www.layoutvision.com/id16.html
Thanks for the thoughts guys. I have decided to scrap the whole above plan and start from scratch again. I am thinking a two larger industries on back wall of the 12'.5'' section. Maybe plastic pellet silos and with manufacturer and a warehouse with a two spot dock and some storage tracks on the front side. On the 8' foot section two or three tracks for trans-loading of pipe, scrap, cement etc.
Keep us posted on the revsied plan. Just for reference, in the plan shown above, on the lower portion there is a switchback to an industry. I see two brown cars spotted at the right of the lead switch. In all probability you'd find that was not possible, as they'd need to be moved every time you wanted to switch that shipper's spurs. Something to think about for a future plan.
I'll definitely keep that in mind Boxcab. My planner delivered what I asked for in the first plan but I asked for way too much. I gave him a new plan and he is drawing something up. I hope to see a rough draft tomorrow.
Here is a look at the first draft. I think I will remove the two buildings on the top left corner and use the track for rail to truck transload.
Still includes a switchback, which could easily be eliminated through a bit of rework. Best of luck with your layout.
Thanks! I am going to keep it for now and do some test runs before the track gets permanently fastened down. If I find it a pain in the rear I will pull it up and put a switch in off of the "main" line.
Plan #2 revision #1 Moved the propane dealer from the bottom right side to the top left side. Put a cement and general use trans-load in where the propane dealer was. Also put in a pulp loading spur on the Point Edward side for intermittent use. Canford Lumber will be renamed for a frozen food distributor and will receive 57; reefers.
This revision of your plan shows how to get rid of the switchback on bottom. The one on top is OK because the lead to the industry on right is long enough to pull cars from one on left. Is that an interchange RR on very bottom? Also what are you going to use for a yard? Don't know why but your latest plan is on top but bottom one is my revision of your previous plan.
Aside from switchbacks which I can't spot as easy as you guys (and don't know why a SB is such a no no. I think it adds need for strategy), I still don't see a connection to the outside world or interchange track on latest concept. First idea has a couple tracks which, with a few more inches of rail out to the edge or edges could create this. The upper peninsula , the track at very right (east ?) between the 2 green cars at the loading docks and continuing straight on through (west ?) to under the overpass to edge. Not a high speed main, still in yard limit speed, but at least on higher ballast, no ? And west end can be the 0-5-0 staging area; maybe a fold down cassette.
Mark in the real world which way are you & most everyone else in the world going to do things - the hard way or the easy way. And when you add additional labor costs into the equation it makes even more sense to not have switchbacks, i. e. doing it the hard way. In other words in the business world: "Time Is Money" so the RR is losing money the longer it takes labor to do the work. The RRs only gets paid for doing a switch move not by how long it takes to do the move. But guess modelers think this is more "interesting" even though it's not very prototypical. Besides most old head conductors won't put up w/ it unless they're just trying to "get their 12". LOL
That's because you may not be thinking about the real-world situation. In real life, rail cars take time to load or unload. During that time, the load is not stabilized and if the car is moved, the load could be damaged. So what a switchback with industries on each “wing” suggests is that one profit-making business is going to stop unloading their car, re-arrange everything inside the car to re-secure the load so that it won’t be damaged, close up the car, and then sit around twiddling their thumbs while the railroad moves their car away in order to switch an unrelated business on the other “wing”. And then later, the railroad returns the car and they have to start again on the unloading process. That’s just not realistic. Artificial “puzzle” switching complications are just annoying to me personally -- not fun. Instead, applying realistic concepts related to shifts and seasonality (for example) can add interest and challenge without a puzzle.
Yup. Exactly. A railroad charges customers to spot a car. A customer only has so much time to keep a car for loading or unloading. If they exceed that time, the railroad or car owner charges them a not at all cheap fee called "Demurrage". The time needed to shuffle cars to switch someone else steals from the other assigned shippers hours. Moving and re-moving cars eats time, running around a car or cut of cars, positioning the engine to pull or shove, any of which costs the railroads more money.
Yes, I know this about the 'real world' for many many years. But some industrial spurs do this, never the less, because of complexities of availability and vicinity of property/leasing-owning in relation to older buildings and spurs to already established. The 3,7, industries already there for decades are not going to move out or swap properties with the new comer. But new comer got a great price, the RR wants the business here and so lays in new rail knowing the extra spotting/shunting work cost is worth it. A couple years back (+-) Kalmbach had a special 'how to' issue on 'running a MRR realistically'. There is a switchback on the "River Run" example, showing moves crew has to do, due to this. And, more important, it's not the real world. it's a hobby where lots of smaller layouts can always use some strategy or puzzles to add more' fun time' for lack of mileage. Plus MRRs like this are usually unrealistic roundy rounds on a 4x8 anyway; and not point to point like the real world. I'm sure you know as well as I there are many exceptions to the norm in railroad practice. There's a switchback in (I think) Kentucky on (is it) a NS branch main still in use. Crews reportedly hate it. But never the less deal with it....I don't think it's Hagans on the defunct L&N. Anyway, we're talking about industrial spurs, not mains...different headache.....But both do exist.. Gabeesh ?
Then it is puzzling that you said that you did not understand the issue with switchbacks earlier. There are some switchback moves in real-life railroading (often to gain or lose elevation), but I have never seen a single one with an industry on one wing that must be emptied to switch an unrelated industry on the other "wing". I can't follow the rest of your post, so I will withdraw from this conversation. So no, I don't "Gabeesh" [sic] As I pointed out in my link, which I guess you didn't take time to read, there are more interesting and more realistic ways to add operating challenge than through artificial tricked-out puzzles.
