Hi, I’m Andrew. I’m fifteen years old and has been a model railroader for 2 years. I’m starting my next layout that I want to finish before I graduate from high school. My layout is going to be themed off of Milwaukee’s industrial look. (For those of you who live in Milwaukee, sorry if I’m wrong. Thats the impression I got when I went there last summer.)
I need some help adding a Washington Salvage Yard Industry by Walthers to my layout. The layout is going to be 6’ by 10’. I think I know where I want to put it, but I need some ideas on how to lay it out like where to place the building relative to the yard with all of the scrap material and where to put railroad sidings. If you could give me some ideas or pictures of the layout of salvage yards, I’d really appreciate it!
Are you modeling present day? Do you have “google-earth”? It is free, you can download the special program it needs easy IF you have a home computer. (Most school computers policies will not allow you to download and install outside programs.)
Hunt up locations of real metal salvage yards in a phone book or online, then “visit” the locations by satellite view courtesy of GoogleEarth.
My dad was in the sheet metal business in the 1950s. He would go to the salvage place with his work car pulling a trailer load of scraps. Drive onto a scale, weight vehicles with scrap, unload scrap, weigh vehicles again to figure the weight of the scrap. For a scrap yard, you need a truck scale and a place for people bringing scrap to drive. Probably next to office.
Another consideration-- yards often divided scrap according to categories. Stainless steel separate for ordinary old ion and steel. Copper separate. Some scrap materials might be resold “as is” for reuse in some way rather than shipped off to be melted down. Hold and see what the market is.
A “car crusher” would be a great scene. There was one in the 1960-something James Bond movie Goldfinger that squeezed a fancy new car into a chunk of scrap. They usually use old junk cars!
There was a scrap yard in Corpus Christi that got a streamlined car from the Rock Island Golden State train. Kept it 20 or so years and used the car as an employee lunchroom.
Hey there, Andrew. Learning to think things through before installation is one of the lessons of model railroading. My thought would be: In scrap yards as in many other items, Form Follows Function.
For most salvage yards trucks bring the scrap in, which is sorted and loaded by the salvage company into gondola cars for shipment out to a smelter. You get to decide how the roads on your layout will access the salvage yard. Most likely, the office building would be located close to the entrance from the roadway. A scale for the trucks would be nearby. Most of the visitors to the office would be from truck drivers or others bringing in scrap. The train crew would not necessarily visit the office when they make a set-out or pick-up. There would be some parking space for employees near the office building, but further out among the piles of scrap the pathways may be more rutted or pot-holed.
Just think about the logical “flow” of traffic in the scrap yard, especially in view of where you can connect a driveway or road. Most of the salvage yards I have seen use a stub-end track rather than a siding with a turnout on each end. The cars being loaded may be in the scrap yard for some time until they are full, depending on the capacity of the scrap yard.
Did you see the series on Milwaukee’s “Beer Line” in MR awhile back - as that went through an industrial area?