I’m a recent newbie who is currently constructing a 5x12 HO layout in my garage. My first engine bought was a BN SD40 so my theme will be free-lanced BNSF, present day. However, two things got me thinking that maybe I should cater for steam locos:
(1) I recently purchased an Atlas 90 foot turntable in a larger mixed bundle of goodies (including a very nice UP C30-7 with DCC decoder)
(2) my mate successfully ran a few of his 4-8-4 engines on the layout…very surprising for my tight and twisty turns!
I’m planning to extend the layout with 12 foot section down another wall of the garage, so that the layout will be a big L. In the new section could be a maintenance yard to cater for steam and diesel. Perhaps I will purchase stock for a transitional era, or just run a special passenger train in current day.
My steam knowledge is very limited. Sure you’ve got the classic turntable and engine house, water towers and coal/ash pits, but what else is there and what is their function in a full day eg. from lighting the fire, moving the engine out of the shed…to bringing it home, emptying out the ashes and putting it back in the shed?
For steam, you will need/want the following structures and items:
-Water tower and/or water column
-Coaling tower or coaling conveyor
-Sand tower & drying house
-Ash pit/ash conveyor
-Additional hoppers and gondola for moving ash, sand, and coal
-Service track
Optional but not necessary:
-Inspection pit
-Wash rack
Ross, a good reference to get that would be handy for you is The Model Railroader’s Guide To Locomotive Servicing Terminals by Kalmbach Books. It has contains info one both steam and diesel service facilities. Lotsa pictures and good info in it.
Walthers has a full line of kits for all the major servicing facilities for a steam era engine terminal. In addition to the facilities mentioned above, you might consider a machine shop for repairs that couldn’t be handled by the roundhouse servicing facilities. Check out the current Walthers catalog beginning on page 446. It gives a good description of what a complete steam era servicing facility would need.
If you are going with steam in modern day railroading, most of the structures like water tank and coaling tower most likely would be gone.
Coal would be delivered by truck and either hand loaded or with a front end loader. Oil burners are filled by an fuel truck.
Water would come from a fire truck, other some other kind of water truck or wherever passenger diesels get water for their steam generators.
The fire box would simply be dumped on the ground and watered down to prevent burning the ties.
Sand would come from the sanding tower that you should already have for the diesel servicing.
The wash rack can be anywhere out of the way, using a portable steam cleaner.
The roundhouse and/or turntable was torn down years ago, so repairs, lubrication and storage are done at the diesel facilities. Steam engines would be turned on a wye or balloon track.
That would save you space (if you already have a wye or balloon track) and cost of the structures. All you really need is a dump truck for coal, tanker truck for fuel oil, a water truck or fire truck, front end loader or a couple guys with shovels.
I’m in the midst of the same thing, setting up a steam loco servicing area.
Two books were might helpful to me:
Track planning for realistic operations, by John Armstrong, has a whole section on loco service.
The Model Railroader’s Guide to Loco Service Faciliities by Martin McGuirk… An entire book on the subject.
Both are Kalmbach, available at decent discount on amazon.com ($15 and $12 respectively) or wherever you prefer… I recommend both and even bought the latter (I’ve taken the Armstrong book out from the library a few times, but didn’t feel the need to own it permanently since my track planning days are done for a while, i think.)
Lubrication of steam locos was a major item. Even in the present day, any place that regularly services tourist or special-run steam will have a fireproof (brick or block) shed to store the numerous different kinds of oils and greases needed to keep a steam loco healthy.
Unfortunately, the Atlas turntable is not 90 scale feet long, it is actually 9 inches long. This scales to 65 scale feet. I’m afraid those 4-8-4s aren’t going to fit on an Atlas turntable. In fact, very little modern (post WW1) steam will fit. A 2-8-0 or 4-6-0 is about the biggest steam engine likely to fit, and then the tender can’t be too big.
There are other makes of turntables (Bowser, Walters, Diamond Scale, Fleischman, etc) that are 90 scale ft and larger, but all of them cost a lot more than the Atlas. Another alternative is to build a larger turntable using the Atlas turntable underneath as the base.
Wow! Cheers to all for the great advice and tips. I’ll chase down some of those books. The idea of converting the 65foot turntable to a 90 foot version is appealing. I’ve certainly got a few decisions to make!
Do you think I could get away with having all the old structures required for a 50s steam system, under the guise of a steam railway museum? Hence, an excuse for keeping and restoring coal towers, cinder pits etc.
Another question: when the fire box is emptied and the ashes are dumped in the ash/cinder pit, what do they do with the ashes? Are they somehow lifted out and put in a truck to be carted away?
Absolutely! Some of the smaller facilities kept, operated, and repaired the older structures well past their prime. If it still worked, they used it.
There were a couple of methods used. In the old days, when labor was cheap, they just had a large brick or cement ash pit - i.e. an open pit underneath a section of track that was supported on metal stilts instead of railroad ties - where the locomotive would dump it’s fire. (They couldn’t use wooden railroad ties in and around an ash pit for obvious reasons.)
There was another track that ran along side the ash pit track that went down into the pit. A gondola or hopper was used as a recepticle and someone or someones hand shoveled the ash into the car.
Later on, ash conveyors were used. The ash conveyor was a tower, with a motorized pulley system, that raised a bucket of ash up and out of the cement ash pit and dumped it into a gondola or hopper, located on a separate servicing track behind the ash conveyor.
Larger facilities, servicing many locomotives a day, would have had an ash conveyor to save time (and eventually money). Older facilities might have still had the old style pits that required manual labor to extract the ash.
When it came to coaling towers, not all facilities even could even afford that. In that case, coal was dumped along side the track, and coal conveyors - or, even steam shovels - were used to transfer the neede
Tom, thanks for that knowledge and encouragement. I checked out your photo album. I like the side-by-side diesel and steam servicing area. I could definietely use that concept! Did you scratchbuild that freight house? Great detail!
Tom, the inspection pit is a necessity. SOP on US railroads, and most everywhere else in the world, was to inspect locomotive running gear every time a loco entered an engine terminal after a trip. This required a pit, so that the employee/s could get at the components between the frames such as hornstays/pedestal binders, driving boxes, wedges, foundation rigging, spring hangers and equalisers, and the like. On older locos with inside valve motion, a pit was usually needed to oil around. Also, in the US the ICC mandated regular periodic inspections of running gear, which again required a pit.
Well sure Union Pacific retains 7 stalls of the original 48 in Cheyenne Wyoming they also have 1/3 of the original backshop and the 126’ turntable. All of the above is used by UP’s steam program. Evanston Wyoming isn’t used but the complete roundhouse and turntable are still there.
I agree with you whole-heartedly. The only reason I put the inspecton pit in as “optional” was because I was thinking of it as part of or inside the actual roundhouse and not outside on the terminal track. I’ve seen pictures of the inspection pits outside but usually it’s for diesel inspection.
My comment also was NOT to imply that inspection pits weren’t necessary for the proper functioning of railroad equipment and locomotives. The steamers, moreso than the diesels, needed periodic and daily inspection to keep them in tiptop shape.
Thanks for the encouragement, Ross.[:)] No, the freight house is an out-of-production Alexander Scale Models (ASM) craftsman kit that I just put together. Here’s a link to a page that gives a little more detail on it:
I’ve done some extra detailing on it that was not in the original kit. Right now I’m waiting for some dimensional 1 x 8 wood strips to be “delivered” to one of my LHSs. (Had to order some more from Walthers.)
I found out recenly that ASM was bought by Tomar Industries and the kits are being re-released again. (They fetch a pretty penny on eBay.) They are a bit of work to put together, but it’s still fun and I’ve enjoyed detailing them - so much so that I’ve pretty much neglected running my trains on the layout. [:0]
Ross, most of the info I gave you about the servicing facilities came out of that MR locomotive servicing terminals book by Marty McGuirk. As I mentiond before, it’s a good reference with lotsa great pictures to give you ideas. The Suncoast FM Coaling tower on my layout is the exact one pictured in the book. (That was another “scratch-built” kit project. ) As nice and as detailed as the other coaling towers are that are on the market (e.g. Tichy and Walthers), I like the Suncoast because - at 4" tall - it doesn’t tower way above my small layout like the other towers would.
What I’ve discovered so far about servicing facilities is that they are as variable as snowflakes: No two facilities were ever the same. They did, however, have common features that should or can be modeled on a layout. It’s a challenge to figure
Tom, Melbourne is a great place to live and visit. Glad they had a good time. We spent a year in Allentown, PA, in '96 and had a ball. Pity I wasn’t in to trains back then! [:(]