I am kicking around ideas for a yard for my HO D&H layout. I have a 2’ x 12’ shelf which would be ideal and I am designating the yard “Colonie/Mohawk” because this was the big yard at the Albany end of the Albany/Susquehanna Division.
I can go two ways here, jam in as many tracks as possible or go with fewer tracks and have them do double duty. Basically I believe I can get as many as 8 parrellel tracks into the space but every time I look at it on paper it looks a little too jammed up.
The basics of the yard would be to breakdown and make up trains going either into staging (representing the D&H Champlain Division/Canada & D&H East of the Hudson; and interchange with the B&M and NYC), locals into “Albany” (a 4 x 8 variation of the original ‘Beer Belt Line’ design), locals for the modeled part of the Albany/Susquehanna Division and throughs/locals going to Oneonta and beyond (another staging yard).
I see locals as being 5-8 cars; an engine and a caboose and ‘interchanges/throughs’ being about twice that long. Time period being 1955-1970(?) era equipment.
I figure I need a double tracked main (although not necessary), classification tracks for the various destinations, a drill track, a caboose and an engine track. I plan on things like engine servicing, car servicing and repairs being ‘off stage left’ and I don’t think I’ll have any other ‘industries’ on the same shelf with the yard. I plan on the yard being a double ender as trains need to go off stage to staging, move in the same (modeled) direction to get to Albany and move in the other direction to head down the A&S Division.
Based on the above I’m looking for input from anyone who has yards of about the same physical size. I’d like to know the total number of tracks you have, what purposes they serve, what you like and what you’d do differently.
I’m also looking for input from anyone who’d like to throw out ideas as to what I might want to consider put
I recommend John Armstrong’s book Track Planning for Realistic Operation. He covers yards. Also you might want to look at The Model Railroader’s Guide to Freight Yards by Andy Sperandeo.
Well, Yards will look jammed, but they were designed to use space efficently. However, the point of a yard is to be empty, and not a logjam. Cause a full yard means cars not earning money. Just a thought. Love to see your drawing!
For me the answer to your question has to do with volume of traffic. I work a basement layout that has two yards each with about 12 6-12 foot double ended tracks. There are times it is so jammed nothing can move. Just one extra track would seem like a godsend. The trains they run are 10-20 cars long and have multiple destinations and priorities.
How many tracks do you need? You can tell that from your operations plan.
So, I would start with a diagram of the real yard. Put in the main, then the branches, then the interchange. From that add the “Yard” proper. What features does the real one have and in what configuration. Pick and choose from those. Put in the most important thing first. Then the second etc. When the space is gone it will consist of the most important things.
In my opinion 2x12 is tiny for a major yard in HO. Do you have enough staging to support a major yard as described?
Essentially this is going to be a ‘one engineer’ layout for the foreseeable future so I’m going to have to run the trains in sequential order.
I’m going to use a card-order forwarding system and probably not going to try and run anything like a full daily time table. At this point I imagine that most of the traffic will be “west” bound with unit coal and bridge traffic trains running acrossed the scenic portion of the A&S, along with a local, with everything west of Schenevus/Wocester (which was a helper point) being staging.
As to traffic coming into/out of the yard I’m imagining about 14 trains a session. But they don’t all have to be going at the same time. So for example a NYC interchange will bring in a train and pull out a train, ditto for the B&M and everything going north to the CP. So really each exchange will only need two tracks with one being cleared as the outbound pulls out.
I don’t forsee the yard getting jammed up because much of the rolling stock will actually be out in the two staging yards.
My question for you is how many trains are you running out of each of your 12 track yards per operating session and what is the width of the space of those yards. I’m guessing at 12 tracks per yard they have got to be more than 2’ wide.
Oh I’ve got the plan for the ‘real yard’ and it was way too big for even reasonable selective compression. I agree that 2 x 12 is too small to do it justice but I have to work with the space I’ve got that is why staging will be so important. The ‘west’ staging yard needs to be between 6 and 10 tracks while the rest of the world staging yard probably needs to be 10 or 12.
What I should have included in my original posting is that I’m going to be in an apartment for at least the next three years due to job considerations so I’m taking the 4 x 8 ‘Albany’ city module with me and then building the rest of the railroad in 2 x 4 modules (so the yard would be three modules) which when completed can go into storage pending the acquisition of a suitable permanent space. The nice thing about that is if the permanent space allows for more room then I can just slap additional modules in.
However with the City module being the base and the yard being the launch pad for the rest of the layout getting the yard right is a key.
In a 3 hour session there may be 8 trains out and just as important, 8 trains in to be broken down. The problem is when they all come in at once. There are also several through trains and a local that will drop 4-5 cars and pick up whatever it has room for.
You are right, you only need as many tracks as you have destinations (interchanges plus staging) plus an A/D track.
I can’t imagine the tracks being much more than 2" if any. In addition to the tracks are the industries behind the yard.
A 2x12 yard in HO could work for a small subdivision yard from which local freight trains would operate from and where through trains would drop off and pick up cuts of cars. This should include a small engine facility, an arrival/departure track, and three or more sorting/classification tracks. I’d also try to work in a repair-in-place (RIP) track becuase it is the ultimate “universal” industry, as well as a caboose track to support those local trains. And don’t forget trackage providing material support (fuel, sand, and such) for the engine terminal which can represent substantial traffic/operation. I believe only very large layouts can support a division-point classification yard unless that represents the entire layout.
That space could also serve as a yard supporting an industry, an interchange yard, and other subsidiary-type yards, but I doubt that’s what you had in mind.
Mark (who dislikes yards: give me a run-around track and industrial spurs, and I’ll be a happy camper)
At this point in the think due to space limitations this is going to be strictly a classification/interchange yard without any of the service items you mentioned.
Maybe a little background will help.
The D&H was never a large railroad to begin with. It consisted primarily of two major divisions, The Albany & Susquehanna running northeast from the PA coal fields to Albany, NY and the Champlain running north from Albany to Canada. I live along the A&S so that’s the area I’m going to model.
On the A&S you have the big coal yards down in PA, a mid-sized (for the D&H) yard in Oneonta and the big yards at either end. I have no interest in PA and Oneonta real just classifies for the D&H A&S it has no interchanges worth speaking of.
If I can come up decent plan for ‘Colonie/Mohawk’ then I’ll have interchanges with two railroads (NYC & B&M giving me an excuse to have those engines come on-stage), I can dispatch D&H locals along the A&S and the Champlain, into Albany (an urban switching layout) and east across the Hudson, and have a place to reclassify and dispatch coal traffic comi
As long as the A/D tracks are double ended, you don’t need the classification tracks to be double ended - at least from a functioning point of view. If your locals are 8 cars, you can figure you need 4 feet for them. You’ll want a caboose track, and probably an RIP track. These can be much shorter.The lead can parallel the main and does not have to be part of the 12 feet restriction.
Depending your era, your switcher at least will need fuel if diesel, or fuel water and a maintenance area for steam. These don’t have to take a lot of space–no need for roundhouse, turntable, etc.
Why do you need a double main if you are the only operator? If you are not the only operator, a few well placed sidings will serve as well. It doesn’t seem like you have the traffic for a double main even if you ran 14 trains a day.
Yard ladders take a lot of length, even if you try compound ladders. As an example, here’s a fairly small straight-ladder HO yard from a custom project that occupies 2X8 feet.
Note that as you add additional tracks to the yard, the body tracks become shorter and shorter until they are not worth the trouble. This is especially true of double-ended yards. Yards serving double-track mains can also be constrained due to the need to accommodate additional crossovers.
Your goals for this yard seem somewhat over-ambitious for the space you have allocated. Good luck.
Well I like the idea of being able to just ‘run’ a train around the layout without having to worry about a reversing loop (I haven’t made up my mind if I want to go DCC or not, it would require upgrading about 55 engines, the idea is appealing but the cost is, shall we say, a bit high.), while I’m switching. Besides I’m not sure how some of the older engines (some over 30 years old) will take it. I think I may have a solution by having the second main double as an Arrival/Departure track when not engaged in continuous running.
I do like the plan that was posted, thank you Bryon. And you’re right the goals are ambitious but I’d rather shoot high and settle for less than to plan ‘reasonable’ and then find I’m missing something I really want. Besides with a modular (David Barrow calls them “Dominoes”) design I can always fit in more modules if the space winds up being bigger.
I’ve been using Xtrcad all of week and have a “second” design I came up with, the one that prompted this thread. I’ll post a picture as soon as I can figure out how.
Thanks guys your ideas/thoughts are helping me think this through and I appreciate it.
There are layouts in the area where there were 20-30 trains run on a single mainline. Of course, we had a good dispatcher and a computerized system.
Now just to be sure about the cost of conversion to DCC. If you think about it, probably only 10 or so of your engines get any real running time. The rest are mostly decoration. You can get a pack of 10 fairly good decoders for $12 ea. Convert the ones you actually run then add a couple in here and there as you go along. Once you get the hang of it, conversion goes pretty quickly.
If, however, you convert all of them at once, you could probably negotiate the price to $8-9 ea. If an engine runs well on DC it is worth converting. If it doesn’t, you probably don’t run it anyway.
Getting your layout up and running on DCC will probably cost less and take less time than running a second main. Not to mention it would save you time and expense of wiring the blocks. For a lone wolf, the Digitrax Zephyr at $150 would do the job nicely.
I don’t need to tell you how much fun it is to be able to run consists, switch and run mainline in the same area, run helper engines, and all the other things real trains do that isn’t allowed with DC.
If I could only get the hang of XTrackCad I could show you where I’m going with this but I have given your input a lot of thought so here’s where I am today decision wise.
2x12 is only big enough for a classification yard with maybe a RIP track and a Caboose track fit in ‘outside’ the ladders. But when I did my preliminary “North/South/East” Staging Yard design I realized that if I put in a short “viewblock” I can fit an engine servicing facility on the same 2x12 board the staging is going into.
So that yard is going to consist of 7 staging tracks (longest being 10’ and the shortest about 7’), the view block and then a double track engine servicing facility with an 18" turntable.
The “West” staging yard will pretty much mirror this yard without an engine facility but a turntable to turn around the engines without having to use the ole 5 finger method (or two hands for some of the brutes).
So right now the design runs “NSE” Staging/Engine facility connecting to the City of Albany (4x8 hopefully to be fully tracked with in 6 months) with the visible (Mohawk/Colonie) classification yard on the “far side” of Albany.
Basically it is going to look like a Giant “U” that is 16x8 with a 4’ walk in operators pit. Since this is a one man operation that’s fine.
The “reason” I’m going this route is that I’m moving into an apartment for work and probably won’t be able to get back into a house for at least 4 years. The stand alone 4x8 gives me plenty of industrial switching and a mostly hidden oval if I just want to kick back and watch a train run in and out of a scene.
That is the only board I’m a member of that I can post photos to and actually the only thing over there is the photos. If you have an alternate suggestion I’d be happy to listen.
Belonging to that board isn’t really any different than belonging to this one. Just register.
