would like to install a hump and bowle yard to my n-scale rr woud that be doable and or fisebale len clancy
At the club I used to belong to we did it in HO, and it worked fairly well. We had air jets as retarders, and at the crest of the hump we had 3 Kadee magnets lined up to make sure we got uncoupling.
I’m not so sure about N scale. The coasting ability of the cars, even with good wheels and trucks, is far less than HO models. We had to pick and chose by testing those cars which could actually make it into the yard tracks, just blindly running any car over the hump was asking for one to get stuck in the throat somewhere.
–Randy
I would think a “booster” air jet would solve the problem for any gauge. If a constant stream air jet were directed down the hump at the hill break it would kick start the car. If retarding is necessary a few shots of the retarder jets will do the job. I spent many a happy hour in the switching/retarder’s tower in the New Haven’s famous Cedar Hill classification yard. The hump was designed to kick start the roll and then the retarders were used to maintain an easy roll to prevent a car from slamming into the stopped cars. I also lived up on Ridge Road in Hamden above the freight yard where we could hear them humping cars all night long in the summer time. Every now and then “crash” and another carload was smashed to smithereens. Building a mock-up would be a simple thing to do to test the functionality of your design before you lay all that track. You need a long lead track and a good switcher to pu***he cars up the hump.