In your opinion what is the busiest railroad area, how many trains and cars, and what kind of trains? (Just lokking for more ideas for my layout.) Really, the onlt one I know of is the Powder River Basin. Pretty basic though, coal. Lots and lots of coal. Over 175 trains a day enter and exit Campbell County, Wyoming. Just wondering what else is out there. Thanks for the input!
I’m guessing you want to do Wyoming in particular. I don’t know much about that region, but I did a google search on “railroads” filtering thru the word “Wyoming” and here’s a link to the results. Hope you find something useful in there…
-ken
Take a look at any major seaport and you’ll be talking containers, cars, commodities, you name it.
Off the top I’d look at New York, Baltimore, Vancouver, Montreal, San Diego to name a few.
Fergie
Wyoming, Vermont, Florida, don’t matter.
Don’t know how it compares to other busy rail areas, but the port of Oakland, CA is one busy container port. A higher percentage of containers go in/come out by rail than in the only bigger West Coast port of Los Angeles/Long Beach. Oakland Port Authority has worked with railroads to expand rail yards twice in the past 10 years to get higher container throughput - they got more land from the military base closings in the '90s. LA/LB has the vast majority of imports, but Oakland has the lion share of exports. Many ships offload primarily in LA/LB, then come north, offload remainder in Oakland and/or Seattle/Tacoma, and onload for the return trip at Oakland.
Most common traffic is the container cars - both single and double stack. There are also plenty of auto loaders, with spine lumber cars being the 3rd most common from my observation.
I work in Oakland and commute from the North Bay, hours are irregular and the freeways parallel the main line and yards in places. I can’t tell you how many trains per day, but I know there is always something moving into/out of Richmond and Oakland at any given time. Amtrak also makes at least 6 runs a day round trip between Oakland and Sacramento.
Even the old SP Donner Pass route (150 miles east of Oakland) sees trains at least hourly around the clock, including a couple of Amtrak. And Donner Pass is probably the least preferred route through the mountains due to grades and winter snow. My anecdotal observations (when I’m camping or skiing in the area) is that Donner Pass is now used primarily as an eastbound route; westbound traffic seems quite rare.
my observations
Fred W
Even though it doesn’t have the volume, the area around Harrisburg, PA would be hard to beat for variety. This is a major north/south east/west crossroad area for trucking and railroads. I live just north of Enola Yard and the Rockville Bridge. There is what amounts to about a nine mile long lead track for Enola Yard. It is not unusual to see three or four trains sitting on that track waiting to get into Enola Yard. There are unit coal trains a couple times a week, full ones going east, empties west. With two good size container yards in the area there are several container trains everyday. I’ve seen “unit” tank car trains and whole trains of flat cars carrying farm equipment. Of course there is the ever present mixed freights with everything from autoracks to spline cars carrying wood products. Railfanning never gets boring here!
There’s a lot of traffic going through Folkston Ga. every day. Most of the traffic in and out of Florida goes through there.
The BNSF has a yard in Winslow, AZ that has up to 90 trains a day on both east and west bound traffic. You can view this activity right from the back of the La Posada Hotel. If you are interesting in the hotel information itself their web site is http://www.laposada.org/. I just wish they had a web cam available.
It is one of the original Harvey Houses hotels that has been restored for modern day use.
Back in the spring of 2005 our family took a vacation and we stopped, at lunch in the restaurant at the hotel and I counted over 15 trains that passed in a 90 minute period.
Most of the traffic was containers, and you can spot this same flurry of activity all along Interstate 40 as it cuts through Arizona.
The greater area has a large variety along with lots of train movements.
CP Rail, CN, BNSF and Southern Railway of BC (ex BC Hydro) are the four big freight lines. VIA Rail, Rocky Mountaineer, West Coast Express (commuter rail) and Amtrak are all active passenger lines (plus SkyTrain on dedicated r/w). If you go back a few years, then you can add BC Rail/PGE, GN, BC Hydro Railway.
Bulk commodities rule: coal, lumber, pulp/paper, wood chips, grain, sulfur, containers, auto racks. But lots of local switching still happens as well.
Would be a good place and being Canadian, would add a little more of a challenge to accurately model our unique locomotives, especially if you go pre-90’s.
As you can see, Wyonate, you’ve asked a wonderfully open ended question. You might look at UP’s mainline in Wyoming. I drove across I-80 some years ago and saw a good mix of coal, containers, and grain. They all were big trains with big horsepower to conquer the continental divide.
I’ll also stick-up for my local hot spot. The BNSF mainline headed north from Seattle to Everett sees 50+ trains per day and a great variety of consists. Westbound traffic (which runs south from Everett to Seattle) includes unit grain and occastionally coal, loaded auto racks with empty double stacks and spine cars, and loaded mixed freight coming south from Vancouver. Eastbound trains are dominated by loaded double stacks and spine cars. Trains headed for the BNSF crossing of the Cascade montains are usually headed by three or four Dash-9’s. Occasionally we still see distributed power with three Dash-9’s on the point and two more cut in the middle. The trains that head up the coast to Vancouver usually are pulled by three or four SD40-2’s. This same corridor sees passenger traffic from both Amtrak and our local “Sounder” commuter service. Amtrak runs Superliners behind GE Genesis’ for the Empire Builder as well as Talgo train sets pulled (and pushed) by F59PH’s. The Sounder uses Bombardier bi-level commuter cars pulled by F59’s. All of this traffic moves through a mostly double tracked corridor that snakes along the shores of Puget Sound. A short single track section through the town of Edmonds still exisits, but is being double tracked for increased passenger service. Edmonds also featured a Unical tank farm with a siding and tank car loading facility. As the main enters Seattle it crosses a double tracked bascule bridge over the Lake Washington ship canal and enters a good sized yard with engine service facilities. This yard is still home to several SD9’s and SW1500’s that perform local switching duties around Seattle’s conta
I know it is not the busiest, but here in Erie Pennsylvania I get to see 40+ trains a day. Norfolk and Southern and CSX mostly but motive power from everywhere. The GE locomotive plant is a mile down the road and I get to see the new ones roll out from there. The Bessemer and Lake Erie have trains a few miles away along with Buffalo and Pittsburg.
Where I live in Southern Ontario is very busy. We have CN and CP’s main lines running through our town hauling everything and lots of VIA Rail passenger trains.
Since you didn’t limit your question to the North American continent, let me put in a plug for Japan. Even insignificant commuter lines that wander off to a dead end in the heart of nowhere have a couple of passenger trains an hour and a dozen freights every day (there’s a limestone mine at the end of the branch I’m thinking of.) On more important routes, the traffic is far denser - to the point that EMU trains in central Tokyo during the rush hour run on 90 second headway.
The not-too-important secondary line that I model schedules over 100 trains in 24 hours, and most of them are “pike-size;” 4-7 passenger cars and 20-car freights. That doesn’t include the traffic generated by my imaginary connection, only what can be found on the employee timetable.
Chuck
Amarillo, TX is a real hotbed of activity - trains coming in and going out in at LEAST five different directions - probably more.
For those of us who watch Major League Baseball, every time you watch a Seattle Mariners home game, you hear train horns blaring in the background every few minutes.
I remember watching the Yankees visiting the Mariners right after the Boston Massacre in August this year, and the TV crew even gave us some shots of BNSF freight trains rolling by Safeco Field to answer puzzled TV viewers who wonder what that loud horn was. 
Every few minutes! Wow, that must be some busy BNSF mainline that runs right next to Safeco. The trackage is directly outside the stadium, right under the right outfield bleachers.
Figures I guess… Seattle is a real busy port city.
UP’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska. It is in the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest and busiest railyard in North America.
Every 24 hours, Bailey Yard handles 10,000 railroad cars. It has been said that every type of freight that can be shipped by rail passes through the yard on a daily basis.
Has everyone forgotten the railroad hub of the world…CHICAGO?
Variety? How about every class 1 in the USA and Canada, with the exception of KCS (which gets there in pools)? We’ve got four passenger rail services (Amtrak, Metra, South Shore and CTA) and at least two tourist passenger services. Chicago has bridges, tunels, flat terrain and steep grades. We’re home to both third rail electric and caternary. hicago is a major container destination, as well as coal units, auto racks, chemicals, lumber, grain, and even what’s left of the loose carlot boxcar. hicago has more track in it’s city limits than do most countries, and sees hundreds of trains a day.
Pool all the other suggestions together, and they still don’t add up to the track miles and train density of just this one city.
The correct answer (at least for freight). The densest and highest ton-mile traffic is the UP between O’Fallons and Gibbon, NE.
Dave H.