No two places are the same. That’s what mudchickens and (usually) civil engineers are for.
Hump grades are dependent on efficiency of the retarders, speed, yard & bowl grades/length (physics lesson!) and locomotive power. You do not want a humped car to sail out the other end of the bowl and find Mr. DERAIL or worse.
M/W yards (MOW[xx(]) are usually whatever the local engineering forces can get that is segregated from the rest of a yard for handling materials (and working on machines behind a blueflag in a safe place) and whatever the operating department is not lusting for…i.e. hand-me-downs)
250 trains in a day between 90-150 cars per train. 40 percent is for the automotive industry alone. I will see dimensionals but know not to put them in the hump.
I but up against 4 subdivisions. 1 each from the North East, North West, South East and South West. The city in which it is located has a large oil refinery, auto assembly plant, 4 chemical plants (2 plastic, 1 acid, methanol), 2 paper mills (clay, woodchips, pulpwood, peroxide, sodium chlorate) and 20 other small industries that have 1 or 2 track sidings not exceeding 6 car lengths (box car lengths).
I know it is still quite vague but what kind of size of yard am I looking at roughly?
PTRA North yard…rip track is small yard lower right, receiving yard is the six straight long tracks far right.
Diesel shop and locomotive shop is the large building almost center.
Below and just to the left of that are the yard tower, locker room and employee parking.
Flat switching yard, but you could do it with a hump.
Yard proper has 48 tracks, evenly divided between inbound switching, classification, storage and blocking, and out bound switching, (building trans for BNSF, UP and KCS(far left two yards)
Average car count 2500 cars a day, average 10 to 20 inbound trains per day.
I work here, just in front of the tower.
UPs Basin yard is to the left, the small, long straight yard.
This is UPs Englewood yard, (former SP)and its hump.
Huge, has a intermodel yard at the far left…
Scroll up and look at Settagast,(former MP and HB&T)another flat switching yard.
See the comments of Mr Hemphill, and the Mudchicken.
All of these yards are withing three miles of each other, and all perform the same basic function, but in a different manner.
The North yard was built in 1924, when switching was done with 0-6-0 steam.
The largest hump yard in the world, the UP’s yard at N Platte doesn’t have the capacity to handle that many cars. Assuming a single hump can handle 2000-2500 cars a day, you would need between roughly 10-15 large hump yards to handle the 22000 to 37,000 cars a day (250 trains x 90-150 cars) you are suggesting. That would be an area about 8 miles long and 3 to 6 miles wide.
You would need every hump yard on the largest railroad in N America all located in one spot to handle that many cars.
Count at least 4 to 5 of those inbounds being coke and grain unit trains, we generate two outbound coke moves to Sweeny Texas per shift, three shifts per 24 hour period, and take in a like number of empty inbounds for load out at Arco.
We handle at least three inbound grain trains for Cargil per shift during the season.
I flat switch on average 200 to 250 cars, there are 3 yard jobs per shift.
If we only did 200 cars per job, thats 600 cars per shift, time 3 shifts, 1800 cars switched.
The 2500 car count is the average car count in the yard, it has the capaicity to hold 3000 cars if we stuff the yard.
Oh, and the wash out track is for runaways…it is designed to allow you to divert a runaway car or train into either a open field or a earthen beerm or mound.
Most flat yards do not have one, most hump yard need one!
You might consider modeling a flat yard instead of a hump…
Ed
250 trains a day at 100 cars per train would swamp any yard…
That’s strange–I clicked on the link as it appeared in your thread and it came right up, without my password or anything.
Go to www.uprr.com and the “general public” area–you should be able to find the schematic for the yard at North Platt, as well as the one at Roseville and the intermodal yard at Global 3 (Rochelle).
That’s because your login info is probably stored as a cookie in your web browser. When you vist their site, their server can get your id and password from the cookie file rather than having you type it in except for the first time you logged on.
When I log on to the Trains.com forums, I don’t have to type in my password either because they get saved in the cookie file. The only time I have to log in is when the cookie expires which happens once a month. Kind of annoying that it expires really, because I have to try to remember my password.