Are there any general rules for designing a freight yard? Any best practices regarding making best use of your layout’s yard space without it seeming too crowded?
Any suggestions on the right number of industries to have in your freight/ industrial rail area?
I appreciate any suggestions and/or experience.
Typically a freight yard may have some industries near it, but the function of the yard is to sort out cars for delivery to customers. There are several types of yards:
You will find that most yards have a lead track so that switching does not foul the main track.
Jim
I think this has to do with how much space you have available.
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I have a smallish space, and I will not have a double deck layout… so I will cram in as much as I possibly can. There are no trains running through the plains on the Stratton and Gillette.
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It also depends on what you like to do. I like to move train cars back and forth. So again… cram in as much as possible.
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You might not like this, so you would do something different.
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-Kevin
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Hi NscaleBoiler:
In case nobody has said it, WELCOME to the forums!! [#welcome]
If you want to understand how a yard works and what components it should include get yourself a copy of John Armstrong’s ‘Track Planning for Realistic Operation’. Kalmbach sells them.
https://kalmbachhobbystore.com/product/book/12148
When I first set out to plan my railway I knew diddly squat about how yards functioned. I had a general idea of what a yard looked like, i.e. a bunch of parallel tracks, but I didn’t understand how they actually worked. After I read Armstrong’s book I realized that the yard I had so carefully designed was almost totally disfunctional. Had I built it I would have wasted a lot of time, money and effort. Just sayin’.
There is a ton of other valuable information in the book too.
Dave
There is probably no simple and quick answer to your question. Kalmbach has published a pretty good soft cover book on the subject.
Briefly, a freight yard is a place to sort cars. There are lots of reasons a railroad might want to do that, and each yard is tailored to the needs of the operating railroad. In the classic years, a railroad would have major classification yards wherever two Divisions met. Arriving trains would be broken down, locomotives would be removed and serviced, and new trains would be built up, supplied with fresh motive power, and sent on their way. In some of these very large yards, there would be an arrival yard, a separate classification yard, and a departure yard, in addition to an engine terminal and RIP (Repair In Place) track. Often there were designated tracks for cleaning empty cars, icing of refrigerator cars, exercising livestock, etc. In extremely large installations, there would be separate arrival, cassification, and departure yards for each direction of travel. Such a facility would have ample switching leads for each of these, plus “thorofare” tracks for light engine movements to operate from one point to another.
Obviously, your model railroad won’t have all of those things. For model purposes, we usually combine arrival, classification, and departure functions in a single much smaller yard. Your yard switcher needs to be able to switch the yard without fouling the mainline. Arriving and departing trains need to be able to get to and from the mainline without fouling the switching lead. Engine “escape” crossovers are needed in at least some locations so an arriving locomotive isn’t trapped at the bitter end of a single ended yard track. If it’s a busy yard, you need to leave at least one track open and not blocked by cars, to serve as the thoroughfare.
Along the line, between Division Points, there will be smaller local yards whose main purpose is to allow optimal service to local customers. Often t
When Mike’s Pottery Plant wants to ship product, Mike wants the car(s) now. So a wise yardmaster (or whoever it is) tends to have a car ready, because he is VERY familiar with Mike’s Pottery Plant. And that car will be stored in the yard. Waiting. So Mike’s empty shows up the next day. Not 4 days later because no one could find a car.
Ed
A couple of good references, one already mentioned Track Planning for Realistic Operation by John Armstrong. Freight Yards by Andy Sperandeo (out of print), use the google. Freight Trains and Terminals by John Droege (this one is a long read and a little dry, and written during the first quarter of the 20th century).
Google Maps/Earth satelite view is another useful design tool to see how the prototype does it. You probably wont have room for everything, this is where selective compression helps.
I have found that too much track everywhere is a maintenance headache. That having been said, take a look at my recent post in layout design. Im still working on it, and I think Im getting closer (on my third Cad draft, after about 20 or so paper sketches), I think I found something I like.
I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a late 1940s map of Portland Me, printed by the railroad, which shows track arrangements and which yards (of which there were a dozen or so) served which industries, and a complete list of industries in the Portland Me area.
That is an industry support yard. On the other end is a large classification yard. I believe the quote was “…a yard is a verb…” The idea is to mve cars as quickly as possible through the yard and not to store anything. Depending on what the intent or purpose of the yard is, will determine how the yard is designed and how it operates.
I just happened to pick the August 1955 MR to look at in the All-Access Archives. There is an extensive article on modeling freight yards. It proves that there isn’t much new under the sun. The article contains much of the same information that’s been rehashed many times since then such as compound and spiral ladders, etc.
Ray
I was thinking in particular of the yard at Wishram, WA. I am in the middle of reading about the history of the yard in the latest TNOR, a publication of the SP&S historical society. In that, they mentioned that the yard had several tracks for storage of empties awaiting assignment. That yard is/was certainly not a large classification yard. And it also was not an industry support yard.
Ed
You’ll find lots of advice, lots here already. But for a model railroad, the most important factor in designing your yard is figuring out what the length of your trains will be and designing the yard to fit them. Yes, you can double into tracks and build longer trains. The question will then be, where will these trains go? In other words, what will be the length of passing sidings out on the line the train will use to get out of the way of other trains? If you have staging at the other end, you need to take into conidersation, too, along with the various sidings in between in order to smooth the flow of traffic.
So it pays to think of your yard as part of a larger system, just as the real RRs do. You are more constrianed by space than the 1:1, so figuring out how long those trains will be will help you out every step afterwards with the rest of the layout. It doesn’t need to be an exact match, but you don’t consistently send out longer trains than the rest of the layout can handle. Alternatively, you don’t want an extensive main line run fed by a yard with puny length tracks that requires you to build a train just to get out on the main.
Now, if you don’t really have any place for the trains to go, then you have more of a local switching support yard and the train vs yard track length thing is less important.
when I asked questions about yard design, LDJ-7 June 1992 Freight Yard Design was recommended from the Layout Design SIG at http://www.ldsig.org/publications/journal
Unless a larger shipper needed that boxcar…If Mike’s was a occasional shipper he would need to wait since the yardmaster would send cars to the larger shipper since that benifits the railroad far more then a single car customer. Short lines goes for every load they can get. Trains Magazine has covered this subject many times over the years.
Back to topic. I perfer a double ended yard since that eases the arrival and departure of trains…I would include a runner track so I can move engines to and from the engine service area without blocking the yard crew. In short if locomotives for a Westbound train and the yard crew was working the East end of the yard the engines can move to their train without the need for the yard crew to clear so the road power can get by.
The majority of the small outlaying yards I worked didn’t have a yard lead simply because the lead wasn’t needed since the yards was located off a passing siding or double track main line.The DS simply ran trains around us while we did our work. Bear in mind these small yards had no assigned yard crew or enginehouse.
If you are reaaaaaaly wanting to get into the nitty gritty of a yard design circa WW1, go to Google Books and look for Droege’s book on freight yards.
He also wrote one on passenger terminals.
I just started reading that. Quite interesting persepctive. He starts off by saying how inefficient everything is at the time - high dwell times in yards, car utilization was something like 35%. The real question is, was that because the railroads didn’t care, economic downturn, or the opposite, that the railroads grew so fast that the manual methods of keeping track of everything just couldn;t keep up with the pace of expansion?
There’s a discussion in one of the other sections here about the difference between a siding and a spur - it’s spelled out in this book:
A stub track is a track connected to another at one end only
A spur track is a stub of indefinite length diverging from the main line
A siding is a track auxiliary to the main track for meeting or passing trains, limited to the distance between two adjoining telegraph stations.
–Randy
Its the nature of the beast when you see the big picture,classification of cars,lack of rested crews,maintence of way windows,heavier then normal traffic all take there toll…Even today 40 hour terminal dwell time for some major yards is standard.
The author didn’t explain the cause of the dwell time(if he even knew) that’s why books can be misleading.
Once again Trains Magazine has covered all of that over the years and I have also mention terminal dwell times several times as well…
You must not have read the book. Droege was a very experienced railroad professional and the book is full of design and operating detail. It was intended for other railroads to use in designing their facilities. There is far more information provided in the book than would be found in Trains magazine articles.
I doubt that seeing Trains is a monthly railroad news magazine. Books become obsolete since the industry is ever changing and the best source of information is Trains or Railway Age. Classic Trains tells the history.
A ETT is priceless.
I’m finding the book quite comprehensive, if a bit dry. But the classical (literature) reference are great. How much is truly applicable since I’m modeling a time period nearly half a century from the writing of the book is another story, although just in the first couple of chapters I can see how people like John Armstrong derived their concepts for building model yards. I’m only up to the placement part of th discussion and it sure seems like he covers the pros and cons of different approaches both from a working and safety standpoint, as well as practical considerations like available space and costs of the land (got to get outside the expensive area where you can get the land for pennies per square foot! That won’t even get you swampland these days). I’ve read all the model books - reading how the real railroads did it, even if a bit out of date, can only help to increase my understanding. Now if only I could find a copy of Armstrong’s signals book… saw one one time at a meet but rather than buy it right away I foolishly looked around to see if there was anything else I wanted and by the time I came back it was gone.
–Randy
The ones I have discuss very little about yard design.
As you so aptly pointed out. Trains does describe over a period of months and years a lot of the modern answers to topics (at the time of printing). You have a circular arguement. Print books are obsolete–>industry everchanging. How is a magazine article published 1,2,3 or more months ago any different? The price of the book is 1 year subscription to Trains (or classic trains). In that 1 year you will receive a magazine you can not possibly have more information about how things were done then, and some of the basic concepts discussed persist to this day. For instance, a slip switch is more expensive to install and maintain, and its use should be avoided wherever possible…
3 way switches should be avoided in yard design… Google earth is a great tool, you will find only 2 lap switches in the hump at Moorman yard (which was covered in Trains magazine, but an indepth discussion of its design I do not recall). That having been said, a hump yard is not really something most modelers have room to install.
I could type the whole book here to prove my point (actually I dont think thats legal)
I also subscribe to Trains. But I have not seen much info on freight yard design, even less designing freight yards for model railroaders…
The dwell time is explained in the book.