I have finally found some room to add a small freight yard to my layout. My layout is fairly small, having about eight or so industries most of which hold only one car. How many tracks should my yard have and how many car lengths long should each track be?
Freight yards are for storing and making up consists of cars in a cut, either for classification (sorting by destination/train) or for making up trains. Fairly long tracks (at least 4 or five cars each) are needed for this. I don’t know how long or wide this space is but it sounds to me like you might reconsider on the yard. I have a small switching layout, an L-shaped shelf type, that is 9’ x 2’ along one wall and 5’ x 1’ along the other. I do have some “yard” space, but, this being a point-to-point layout, I need this trackage for runarounds of cuts of cars and for interchange/storage for the cars that go into and out of the six industries that are serviced.
If you aren’t dead-set on having a yard, I would expand your industrial tracks so that you can fit more than just one car in them. Longer tracks to industries makes the scene more convincing that these busineses are actually large enough to be served by rail.
You might consider modeling the yard in such a way that it seems to be only part of a larger yard. You could do tricks like letting the yard ladder continue right up to the edge of the layout and get sliced off there - as if there would be more track if only the layout was wider. You might also have all the yard tracks back up into a mirror, so they look like they are all twice as long. Most real yards, even “small” ones, are far larger than can be reasonably accommodated on our highly compressed layouts. By modeling just a portion, enough to support your operations, you can give a realistic impression.
As for how much you’ll need, imagine a local train that switches every industry on your layout - this would be the “worst case” scenario (I’d argue it’s a best-case, because it’s maximum fun). It sounds like such a train would be about 8, maybe 10, cars long. You need a passing siding to serve as Arrival/Departure track, where that train can originate, and then the yard tracks themselves need to hold that many cars, plus a little bit extra, at a minimum. 3 tracks of 5 cars capacity could hold enough cars to make switching out the cars to make up the local an interesting job, or maybe 4 tracks of 4 cars length; more would be better, as you could imagine that half the cars in the yard are “loads” heading one way while half are “empty” going the other way, so whenever the local heads out to switch the industries, it leaves about an equal number of cars behind in the yard. But if so, you’d probably want a bit more capacity than what I just stated - an 8-car train departs, leaving 8 cars behind, and your yard should have about 4 more car spaces leftover for switching… which means a yard of 20 car capacity.
Thanks. I did some more measuring and I think I can fit a four track yard each about five or six cars long. Also, three of the tracks would be stub sidings and one of them could be a passing siding, which would work well for the arrival/departure track. And hopefully, I would have two locals, one for each of the towns that I currently have.