hey, i was just wondering if anyone has ever made an HO scale hump yard…
if so can u get pics of it ?
i think a hump yard would be awsome to add to a big HO layout !
I know for a fact that it has been done, but I don’t know where to find pics.
there are a few that uses small air jets that blow against the cars to act as a wheel brake retarder…If you plan on building one, then you should but in something like this…a hump yard for models without this type of equipment is impractical …a car bumped off at a hump in scale gets to rolling down the hump way too fast and usually slams into a car on the siding way too hard that can cause damage to couplers , rolling stock, and causes derailments…chuck
Track Planning for Realistic Operation, Third Edition By John Armstrong illustrates how a hump yard is typically laid out.
As Chuck points out, the prototype has speed retarders to control the descent into the bowel. Modeling a hump yard is a real challenge.
You’ll find a hump yard takes up lots of room. Maybe your entire layout area unless you are modeling in Z scale.
The MedinaRailroad Museum is building a model railroad exhibit featuring a hump yard.
Yeah, it’s a physics nightmare for modeling. You need have each car roll the same as all the others all the time. Models lack momentum because they are so light, so they speed up and slow down much quicker than the real thing… I seen pictures in old magazines of ones that were suppose to work, but I have my doubts that they were any fun to keep operating or play with. This is a hobby and should be fun. Tinkering with rolling stock all the time don’t sound like fun to me. Fred
Allen McClelland had one on the original V&O. I think it was shown in the book on the V&O. He removed it before he moved, a maintenance and operations thing, I believe. There should be a couple of pics, if you can find the book on the V&O.
There have been at least two written up that I can remember in Model Railroader. Check the Model Trains Magazine database for dates.
Don Santel had a working hump yard you can see it on on one of the early Model Rail Roader VCR tapes…Cox 47
In the early fifties I spent many a happy hour in the eastern most car retarder’s tower in the New Haven’s Cedar Hill Yard. The grade up to the hump is an easy grade to push long trains up the hump. The down grade is initially quite steep to kick the cars into rolling. All cars weigh and roll differantly so the retarder keeps a keen eye on the speed departing the hump and hits the retarder button as he deems necessary to prevent a collision. Remember, there is a big differance necessary in determining how much retarding to do depending on whether the car is consigned to the very end of the yard track or to one that is almost full of cars already. Most of the roll is on the flat part of the yard where the cars bump into the preceding string of cars. It is a really interesting project for a large model layout. In my planning for a large New Haven layout I hope to be able to include one. The only ones that I have read about that operated successfully used push button contolled air jets to retard the cars. Weighting the cars uniformly would help, as would free wheeling. If the down side of the hump isn’t steep enough to insure a roll that would reach the end of the yard tracks, then I woujld suggest a kicker air jet that would impel them a little faster.
Before I go off half cocked, I plan to build a mockup and experiment with it to see what the variables are that can be adjusted to get optimum performance. If I can’t make the mockup work, then I won’t consider including it.
The late Ed Ravenscroft had a fully automatic 4-track hump yard on the HO scale Glencoe Skokie in Phoenix, using timed air jets for retarders. Fast cars got the full benefit of the airflow. Slower cars only got the later portion, and the very slowest cars didn’t get retarded since the air was off by the time they reached the retarders.
I’m not sure, but I think Ed’s work with that hump yard concept was a direct contributor to the NMRA car weighting RP.
If I recall, Union Pacific built a model of their North Platte Bailey yard (largest in the world) in a passenger car. I’m pretty sure it was N scale though, and I don’t know if it actually operated.
Rick
My yard is about two years away from reality. I was thinking about having a slight slope in it and regulating the car movement by the speed of the locomotive. Maybe by the time I start, someone smarter will have it figured out.
Walter in Columbia, TN
The club I used to belong to had an operating hump yard. At the crest of the hump we had 3 Kadee magnets end to end to make sure we could uncouple, and we used air jets as retarders (since the turnouts were all operated with Del-Aire air machines). Not automated, it was a judgement call on how long to flip the retarder on for. For show purposes we preselected cars that rolled the best and made sure allt he coupler heights were correct, and then basically humped the same cars over and over, after they were all in the yard tracks we ran a switcher to collect the cars at the bottom and then hauled them around the bypass track to do it all over again. In that mode it worked quite well.
Back in the 70’s Larry Keeler has a completely automated hump yard with computer control (before you could just go buy a computer anywhere - he had to build the computer first and learn to program it). It was featured in MR at one point. You basically keyed in a portion of the car’s number and the software took care of routing it to the proper yard track, and sensors activated the retarders to maintain the proper speed into the selected track - even accounting for how many cars already occupied that track.
–Randy
Yes they did, my club is in the process of restoring it, there is a video of it on here and youtube.com . Its not of the whole yard just the west hump. It did work, but it needs lots of rsetoration, and we are slowly working on it. Here is the link.
There’s also the New York Society of Model Engineers. Check out their website http://www.modelengineers.org.
It’s interesting that you say that-- last night I picked up a MR off the pile at random and wouldn’t you know, that was the very issue. It couldn’t have even been subliminal selection as the pile was up on a shelf and in no particular order or date, and I just reached up and pulled one out of the middle 
John
AFAIK, Not a single HO scale hump yard works realistically. Period!
Mass and friction don’t scale so you cannot have an HO freight cars roll at a scale 5 MPH for say the 12 or more foot length of one of the model hump yard bowl tracks as it does in the prototype. The typical HO scale hump yard has rolling stock coming down from the hump at near warp speed, only to grind to a halt some four or five feet into the bowl track. Nothing like the prototype that comes over the hump at walking speed, gains momentum as it crests the hump to about 10 MPH and then, after passing through the retarders, slows to around walking speed and drifts for several hundeds of feet until it couples to cars already on the track or drifts to a slow halt.
Don’t waste you time trying to build a scale hump, it don’t work.
Y’mean nobody’s come up with a computerized system to regulate the air jets yet? C’mon, I’m sure we have the technology.
Motorised box cars and DCC [I]
Larry Keeler had one on his layout here in Kansas City many many moons ago. All automated. Really added to the operating sessions, seems to me Larry had it all automated as far as switch controls and operations.
Bob