In his latest book, Shelf Layouts for Model Railroaders which is very well done BTW, Iain Rice has a Freight House on a track and a Team Track on another one. I thought both were the same. What is the difference I’m missing?
Also, I am planning on building a fiddle yard of cassettes from his first chapters, is there anything I should know in building the shelf?
A ftreight house is kïnd of like a post office building.It is a destination or source of less-than-carload freight.
You order something that doesn’t fill an entire RR car. The shipment gets put into a boxcar with other shipments bound for other customers in your town.
When the car arrives, freight house workers unload it and store the stuff inside the freight house, the emptied car gets sent away (possibly with outbound shipments from the freight house), and you gets notified to come get your¨package or packages.
A team track is just a piece of track where it is possible to pull a truck or pickup or horse-drawn waggon up to a railroad car and unload stuff directly from the RR car into the truck.Or to unload from the car to a ramp or onto the ground, and from there into your truck/pickup/wagon.
You get notified that your car has arrived, and you are responsible for unloading or loading it yourself. If you take too long to unload, you have to pay a rent per day for holding up the RR car.
Used if you order (or ship) enough stuff that you get or need whole car loads, but it doesn’t pay for you to get your own siding. Several customers would get shipments on the same team track.
Like say a small town business that gets one load of lumber once every 14 days. Or a home builder that got a house building kit from Sears in Chicago to build a new home.
Smile,
Stein
IVRW,
building cassette staging requires a good deal of craftsmanship. You have to ensure, that the cassette can be securely fastened, the tracks are level and in gauge. Of course, electrical conductivity needs to secured as well.
MR´s “Build the Beer Line” project shows you, how this can be achieved. IIRC, the vidoes give you a clou, how to do it.
I agree with Ulrich, that the magazines make building/using train cassettes sound so easy. You’ll find that in practice that the tolerances necessary are much greater than most hobbyists expect and moving around anything larger than a 4-6 car train can quickly become a problem.
CNJ831
Thats one reason why I choose this fiddle method rather than a staging yard. In 1895 trains are very short. I plan to have 1 loco cassette, 2 3-car cassettes, and 1 caboose cassette per train.
Hi the use of cassette type storage here in England is very common and easy. I haven’t seen Iains book so I can’t comment on his construction methods but having spent 40 years here in England growing up with his ideas on model railways I can guarantee it will work.
A common method of construction is to attach aluminium angle (3/4 inch-1 inch variety) to a plywood base, gauge is maintained during construction with a gauge (here we have tracksetta brand name) which are 9 to 12 inches long, aluminium is secured with screws to ply. The cassettes marry to a similar short section of aluminium angle which is connected to the rest of the layout, electrical connection is maintained by using various methods the 2 I’ve seen are metal clips which connect the butted sections together and flying leads and crocodile clips…
Shaun
Tracks are often identified by their function. However, tracks needn’t be single-purposed. This photo was taken in Walnut Creek, CA in the mid-twentieth century on the Southern Pacific. The track with the locomotive on it served the freight house of the combination depot as well as functioning as a team track and serving a local “industry” (the local utility is using space along the track to store shipments of poles and wire). So, this single track served as a house, team, and industrial track.
Mark