I’m planning to model a Maintainance facility, and i’m curious what kinds of moves happen in them? Also, How do locomotives and cars that need Maintainance get to them?
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I would use the CSX Huntington Locomotive shops as an example in Huntington, WV, since they do all sorts of stuff from Rebuilds to storage and whatnot, or if something like railcar repairs, I would look through some of the Trains Magazine issues for any help too
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I’ll take a look!
Often times they’ll have either a shop switcher or a track mobile to move locomotives around the shop property. Conrail had a pretty interesting unit for moving engines around Enola. It was numbered Zero and looks like an EMD Blomberg B type locomotive truck with some kind of box shaped structure on top. I think it’s actually still being used by Norfolk Southern to move engines and equipment around the yard. It looks like it would be a relatively simple scratchbuilding project. CR 0 | Conrail Photo Archive
I built a Korber 2 stall engine house, then backed in two tracks, with a switch. All my engines and cars will fit, and i “prop” it with a few guys doing various chores on stuff next to the facility. You can also run through the house, but then limit the cars being worked on.
I worked at a car repair shop outside of Iroquois, Illinois which is off the KBSR. I am currently modeling the KBSR engine yard, my yard and a couple grain elevators.
We would receive the cars from the KBSR on a recurring basis. Some were box cars with a door tack welded to the deck that we had to reinstall. Others were covered hoppers with mangled discharge gates that we replaced. The list goes on. Turns out industries are not very nice to rail cars. Now they make modifications coil cars.
The moves were fairly simple. We had an inbound track where the broken cars were parked. We would switch them to one of our two repair tracks behind the shops. When the cars were repaired we’d then move them to the outbound track and call the railroad to pick them up.
Almost forgot, we had a Switchmaster we used to mover the cars around.
Hope this helps. If you have further questions please ask.
John