I have been researching the way Minnesota Twin Cities shortline Progressive Rail run their trains in Airlake Industrial Park in Lakeville, MN (south of Mpls), and just thought I would share with your guys some interesting stuff I have learned about the modelling potensial of the Airlake Industrial Park.
Discussing this prototype with Jim Hediger and other posters at the LDSIG yahoo group, I also learned a few other things which makes this an interesting place to model.
Like the cool way Progressive handles interchanges with the CP in a very effective way.
The Progressive Rail Airlake Industrial Park line joins a CP branchline near the industrial park. The CP will be coming north on the mainline to drop off inbound cars for Airlake, pick up outbound cars and then heading home (south) again.
Industrial Park switcher pushes outbound cars out on mainline, and north a full train length, leaves cars and runs back to its spur before the CP train with the inbound cars arrive from the south.
CP train with inbound cars (green) arrive and stop just past the siding, cuts off from inbound cars and move up and grab the outbound cars.
While CP check their brake pressure and get ready to depart, the progressi
Very interesting. I like the CP-interchange trick.
Conrail used to drop off cars at customers along the ex-Erie line between Meadville and Corry using two locos and two engineers. It made for some odd trains - two GP10s and five cars hoppers wasn’t that unusual.
I wasn’t claiming that their way of doing things were representative or typical. Their size and uncommon ways of operating is precicely what makes them interesting (for me) - your mileage may vary [:D]
Anyways - care to share a description of some other interesting (to you) LDE or operating procedure from a prototype railroad and some suggestion for how to model it ?
Iowa Traction RR also does the double loco-trick daily in Mason City, Iowa. Thier arrival track is curved out eastwards from the north while one of thier major customers is downs south with their trackage curving in to the east-west going mainline (if you can call it mainline?) towards the west. Almost the same switching puzzle there as on the PRI. They also got a second interchange however that is less intresting as its on the western-most point(not sure might have more track beyond? however crossing both and interstate and another “older” railway seems a bit costly for a “Terminal RR”?)
They also got to keep a eye on traffic and has to have idler-flats on hand at the “correct” side of the train to be able to deliver soya-bean cars to the local food processing plants trackage which on some points are void of the catenary system needed by Iowa Traction RR:s 70 years + old Baldwin-Westinghouse steeplecabs, the idler:s give that extra 50’ reach needed to spot the cars on “dead” spurs.
Yeah AGP Soybean, didn’t think it had enough relevancy to add the name, ppl probably get enough confusing Google hits anyway [
Been looking into it and it seems everything is intact overhead and rails, however maintanence is set to a minimum on those lines, no customers online there atm as it seems.
If someone doesn’t release a N-scale Steeplecab soon I’ll have a friend do a etching or two.
Interesting about Progressive Rail’s operations. I think it would be a great railroad to model, I lived along side it for a few years when I lived in Richfield. (I lived along the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern “high line” from 1958-2005.) I was very glad to see Progressive take over the line - especially using engines with paintschemes similar to the old MN&S one.
Those steeplecab engines have character - Iowa traction’s engines looks kinda like an oldfashioned Norwegian El-1 electric locomotives (http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/El._1), small engines, but they soldiered on from 1922 until the last of the 22 built was retired in 1974.
The Norwegian RR museum at Hamar still has a couple of them.
Roughly the same size yes, 50 ton x 3 + 60 ton x 1 not sure about the HP on the ITR:s motors, B-W steeplecabs have been delivered with between 480 and 1000 HP so either its half of the EL1 or even matching it.
