I started to look at track plans and start getting ideas for my smallish N scale layout and it soon became clear I wouldn’t need more than 1 or 2 engines. After reading through some back issues of Trains I re-read one particular article about small short line railroads buying big power, which made me start thinking.
So hears my questions. I love all diesel, but more inspiration from newer 2nd and 3rd gen diesels. Most of my favorites seem to be in the 4000hp range, 50, 60, and 70 series, Dash 9 series, Dash 8 series. What kind of industries could I look at including on my layout that a shortline with 1 or 2 of these engines could use? Prefferably in single unit consists, with a maxgrade around 2%. Modeling era would reflect the engines used, i.e. if an SD60M or SD60MAC were used the time would not be earlier than 1991.
Thanks for any help, hope I made the question clear enough.
I live next to a short line. It serves mostly grain elevators. There is a plastic plant near my house and is supplied with plastic pellets from this line. There is a cement plant that is not too far away. I don’t see why what you are planning to do won’t work.
I haven’t read article you are referring to so I would ask first is what you described typical for a short line, or was the article describing the exception to the rule? Modeling the typical rather than obscure exceptions will make more sense to others - and possibly to you. But that’s a personal choice.
I would research your question from a different angle, perhaps similar to the analysis a prototype short line might use in their locomotive purchase decision. What kind of load will a 4000hp diesel typically pull up a 2% grade? How many 100 ton cars is that? Do we have industries in our service area that will generate somewhere near that many 100 ton car loads per day? If the answer is no, why waste the fuel and maintenance costs of such a large locomotive? The other considerations in short line locomotive purchases is the weight rating of the track, suitable gearing for typical speeds on the line, and availability of suitable used locomotives and parts to maintain them.
If the track won’t support 100 ton cars and big locomotives without extensive and expensive upgrades and/or maintenance, the purchase doesn’t make sense for the short line unless there is some real profitable traffic to make the track upgrades worthwhile.
Similarly, modern powerful diesels are not generally geared for switching speeds. Is regearing practical and at what cost? If big power is not needed, are switchers and associated parts available at reasonable cost?
Obviously, more power is going to be needed to haul a heavy commodity like ore or coal up a 2% grade than is going to be needed to haul logs downgrade from the slopes where they were cut. But unless a short line isn’t short, speed is not particularly important. Which is where the gearing issue comes into play again. And how much load can your industries generate per day?
Horsepower is for pulling heavy loads at speed, and that includes going up grade. Otherwise, power is wasted. A high tractive effort rating is all that is needed for heavy loads at low speed. Assuming you want to operate at speeds under 30 mph, not a lot of HP is needed.
The real world has a lot of space, one thing that most of our layouts don’t have. So, real railroads have big, wide curves and long turnouts. That’s what you need for today’s big mega-diesels.
One of the beauties of the early diesels was their size - shorter than either big steam or today’s road engines. They fit much better on the curves and turnouts of a typical small to mid-sized layout.
When your article mentioned short lines buying “big power,” they may have been referring to “road switchers” like the venerable GP-7 and GP-9, which were big for their time, but small by today’s standards. There are still a lot of these old workhorses out there on shortlines today, doing switching work and hauling local freights. They weren’t designed as switchers, but they were versatile enough to take on that job.
Well you guys are just bubble busters [:P] But in reality, I was mixing a few things up. The article was June issue of Trains, tittled Big Power For the Little Guys. The “little guys” the article reffers to aren’t little to my standards. Indiana RR, Montana Rail Link, WSOR, and FEC were all talked about. My mind decided to work a little funky and was wrapping in this medium sized 5 page article a short news mention in the Locomotive section littled Meet the smallest GEVO fleet of all, which I also mentioned, about a company called Cemex which bought a single ES44AC for switchingtheir cement plant located in Braunfels, Texas. I got the two a little mixed up and combined in my head and it gave me illusions of grandure. However, I don’t mind the though of running a pair of SD7’s or SD9’s or running a single SD40 (300hp) as the 7’s replacement or an SD50 (3500hp) as the 9’s replacement. I’m not to worried about being totally completely 1000% prototypical. It will be my first endeavor into model RRing so I thought for my first one I would take it a bit easy, lax on some things. Get all my “I wanna buy that CNW/UP heratige SD70ACe because it’s pretty” crap out of my system now, before I get into model RRing seriously. I’m only 26 so I have many decades of rring ahead of me.
Thanks for the tip about hauling wood though. One of the things on possible list was a pulp wood loading facility.
Ok here’s another one for ya, how would I know how much traffic to generate? I mean for instance lets just say I settled on a short line that stretched only a handful of miles that served a coal mine. Walthers makes the Glacier Gravel Company (2 loading tracks) and New River Minning (3 loading tracks) that can be used to model a coal mine, plus a concrete flood loader in N scale. I could easily place the mine on the layout so the mine lead where the cars are is a dead end, hidden staging spur either covered by scenery or shotting down a few inches below layout level. The layout itself probably wouldn’t be big enough, but there could be enough room storage room for this track to hold up to a 65 car string of 45 foot 70 ton hoppers or coal porter style cars. As said before it is my first layout, so I can easily forgo any actual gradiant on the main line and just “imagine” it’s there.
I think I may have fell under the mentality of hp = tractive effort. I was thinking to much car and not enough truck. But, as I said, the trains I run will end up being what ever ones I like that I can find.
I would look what some modern shortlines are doing. There is a DVD called Great Western shortlines that has 10 shorlines on it you may want to check out. They include Modesto & Empire Traction, Amador Central, Central California Traction, Yolo Shortline, Trona, South West Portland Cement, Stockton Terminal & Eastern and the Ventura County Railway
Any place between a half dozen cars and several hundred.
The real question is how many cars can your railroad accomodate? If you can’t hold but a 10 car train then building a 200 car capacity coal mine would be silly.
So back to you, how many cars can you STAGE, how big will your trains be? That’s up to you.
Probably not enough for a coal mine lol. Consist lengths of 4-6 feet would work best, not including engines. I realize that’s not much though, 13-20 hoppers at 45 feet (what I was told typical 70-100T bay hopper is), oooor 12-18 50’ cars or 10-15 60’ pulpwood cars. Although that is one track, the track plan that gave me these ideas was, ooh how to explain, like a point-to-point with continous loops at each end. I basically liked it because of the loops so if I ever wanted to I could just let my trains run. There were two small yards in the original plan, the larger one having 2 storage tracks the other was basically a passing siding. I could easily change all that and have a handful of yard tracks. I certainly wouldn’t bother me having to run my train 3 or 4 times to fill the yard.
I’m also not overruling the possibility of a mutli-deck layout. It’s N scale so 2 or 3 decks 12 inches apart wouldn’t be out of the question. It would certainly give me plenty of room for scenery, which is something I want anyways. My mind sort of pictured a bumpy, tree covered, river laced terrain. I think the tripple deck idea might be…well ok it just plain is a little bit much and pretty grandure, but a double-decker isn’t a bad idea. It would give me enough room to use half the bottom deck as a yard and have yard tracks as long as 10-12 feet!! Lets see… fig