In my home town there is a small NS rail yard that is seldom used except for the occasional local run or transfer with the WNY&P railroad. lately though there has been a quite a bit of activity on the team track. It seems there is a large Gas pipeline project going through our area and they are using this yard to unload and stage the miles of pipe they are going to use. For the last couple of weeks thee has been several rail cars per day of pipe being unloaded and stockpiled. From what I can see from the roads they are unloading at least 5 80’ flatcar loads per day. This would make for an interesting scene on somebodys layout.
This is a good idea for new england modelers because of the recent interest in natural gas from the Canadian maritimes being brought down via pipe line, you could even model a construction crew stringing the pipe thru your layout and under a section of track.
Thanks Dan That is what I like seeing in these post New ideas to help us in the planning stages I see a lot of these same cars when I’m home and never thought of a staging yard. A siding a few flats, a small crain and a few trucks and there you go.
adam has a good question
do companies make simulated pipe loads?
would it be realistic to cut up straws, paint them, and stack them?
Rick Selby used this method for drainage pipes in his book “HO Model Railroad-From Set to Scenery” or somethin like that
A manufacturer is setting up right now to manufacture these pipes for the hobby. Watch for the announcement from Walthers or Horizon as soon as the scale tolerances pass the “Pipe Fitters Inspection lobby”. The devil is in the details, could we actually build something ourselves?
Will
Styrene tubing per chance, inserted into a slightly larger size to create a collar/flange? 1/8"x1/8" or maybe 3/32"x3/32" balsa or styrene for the spacers/frame,
could be painted ,
terracotta - clay pipes ,
black - steel/plastic,
black w/rust - steel ,
blue/green/yellow/other-plastic, …
You can bet if somebody is going to make these they will be three for $5.00 or higher. Brass tubing would be a more correct wall thickness but anything would be better and cheaper made yourself. Straws have been the old standby for 60 years or more and the celophane strip that opens a pack of cigarettes or an audio tape makes a great band to go around them and secure them to the car. A real old time trick is to make all of them but the outside layer that shows about 1" long leaving a void in the center for weight.
P2K is bringing back their 52 foot flatcars with loads on them,one is pipes, with tiedowns, and in the walthers catolog there is a couple of makers of realistic pipe loads.
You can use the same methodology to generate a large sawmill’s traffic w/o any effort to speak of. I once worked a job on the BN that went into Canada where we switched 3 reload yards. They’re facilities for loading lumber miles away from the mill. The mill is located conveniently to the woods and trucks take it to the reload yard. One was a siding long enough for about 12 or 15 cars. The south end was open and was directly loaded by fork lifts and the north end was a raised platform adjacent to a warehouse type building for loading plywood and such. Another reload yard was one long track that loaded by forklift in the open w/ an adjacent track for loading wood chips. The chip trucks would back onto a tilting platform and be dumped and the chips would be dumped and loaded into a bin from which the RR chip cars would be loaded. Both of these are more elaborate than necessary since the third was just a siding about 6-8 cars long. A truck would show up towing a fork lift and then spend the day shuttling between mill and reload track while the fork lift loaded the cars.
