Hi all,
I am in the design stage (also known as clean out the garage stage) of my model railroad. What i was wondering is if anyone out there has modeled a operating hump yard. If so any ideas, tips or suggestions would be appreciated.
Of all the “Great Model Railroads” videos produced by Allen Keller, only one or two people have even attempted to model a hump yard, and only one has been successful. There are two major problems with modeling a hump yard: Retarders and rolling qualities of models. The two modelers who attempted a hump yard, both in HO scale, use small jets of air to simulate retarders. Broken couplers are their biggest nemesis, because models do not roll with the same inertia as a real train car, and slowing them down with the air blast to the right speed is purely guesswork that seems to rarely be right.
The train club near Rutherford, NJ has one in HO… retarders are compressed air jets!
model rr engineer society of NY?? please correct me on my guess for credit.
I saw a hump yard layout a year ago at the GATS in Indianapolis. It was an N scale Ntrak module. It operated well and looked realistic - I don’t remember what the used for retarders, but looked realistic. You might try contacting the Indiana Ntrak clubs and see if they can get you more info. Hope this helps some.
unless you have big bucks to put in a retarder system or fix all the broken couplers that will happen on a model railroad then i’d nix the idea of a hump yard…Atlas has a design for one in their track planner book but everyone i’ve talked to that built that particular hump yard layout say that they wi***hey didn’t do it…the rolling stock moves to fast and broken couplers and derailed equipment is all they got out of it…I believe your best bet is to have a smooth flat yard and install magnetic uncouplers…they’re going to be your best bet in the automation of a train yard…some things you just can’t model with any effective realism…Chuck
I think there was an issue of MR in the early 90s where they discussed making sliding track so that the cars seem to be coasting at a more scale speed, but I’m not sure how well that actually worked when they got it in a hump yard.
I once read an spanish book where they had a hump yard system using elecrto-magnets as retarders. If my memory serves me right, the cars where fitted with an iron plate inside. The electro-magnets where installed like automatic uncouplers, and when activated they slowed down the cars rolling free. I remember they could even be regulated from slow down to total stop with a small switch. It all depended on the amount of electricity provided to the magnet.
New York Society of Model Engineers in Carlstadt, NJ (next to Rutherford, NJ) is the club layout mentioned above, I think.
I can’t seem to get a working link to their web site.
I’ve been to thier Christmas open houses’s before I was really into model trains myself, so I don’t remember about the hump yard.
JIm
I used to be a member of the Lehigh and Keystone Valley club in Bethlehem. In our original (techically second, but they had a different name) location we had an operating model of the Allentown hump yard. Retarders were air jets, easy to hook up because the whole yard used Del-Aire air-operated switch motors. During open houses I was most often seen running cuts of cars through the yard, the dragging them back out via the bypass track and doing it all over again. It normally worked very well, but we did cheat by cherry-picking cars that worked best ahead of time and then using the same cars over and over.
Probably the most amazing operating hump I can remember is Larry Keeler’s that was featured in MR somewhere in the late 70’s. It was fully autoated and computerized, no mean feat as when he built it you didn’t just buy some I/O cards and plug your railroad in, you built the computer, too. According to the description I remember reading, as the hump engine pushed a cut of cars over the hump, you keyed in thr car number and it was automatically directed tot he proper track. The computer kept track of how to route the car, and also how many cars were on each track and adjusted the retarders appropriately. I definitely would have liked to see that one in action.
–Randy
you know you could almost post something a bit umm…tacky about this, but I’ll refrain [:-^], anyways, Hump yards are a challenge to do, best is just to do a flat one and save yourself alot fo headaches along the way.
I am wondering how to protopypically model the tactic called “catching cars”. In this tactic, the engineer increases to full throttle for about 5 seconds then slams on the brakes, leaving the last car(s) that were uncoupled to glide into another set of cars. Speeds usually never get above 10 miles an hour in this maneuver. Besides the track magnets, is there anyway to simulate this?
The hump yard on Larry Keeler’s layout is described in :
Larry Keeler’s Rome Lake Lines, Railroad Model Craftsman, May 1984, page 60
( “KEELER, LARRY”, LAYOUT, “TAYLOR, DOUGLAS”, TRACKPLAN, HO, RMC )
Does anyone know what has happened to his layout ? If you do a keyword search at the Index of Magazines using “hump yard” as the search term, you’ll find 18 citations, most of which are pertinent.
Bob
NMRA Life 0543
If the search doesn’t also turn up the Model Railroader article on Keeler’s layout, Kalmbach is gonna have some ‘splainin’ to do…
The car ‘catching’, well, that’s wat the delayed action feature on Kadee and other couplers is for. For flat switching like that, the car needs to be fairly free rolling. Once in the delayed position, if you stop the loco, the cars will continue on. But since inertia doesn’t scale down, most model cars won’t coast nearly as far as the prototype.
–Randy
This is from another forum…
[image]http://www.railroadforum.com/upload/chapmon/dryhill1.jpg[/image]
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