As a newbie I have been reading the posts about yards and it started me thinking about prototype operation and then transfering that to a model. Since I am from Maine I will use a fictional series of events to see if I may have the big picture. We load a rail car with paper, the paper needs to be in Quebecor printing shop in Minnesota. Guilford (now PanAm) takes the car to Portland Me where the car is grouped with other cars heading west. These car may be taken say to a large yard near Albany NY and regrouped or this car may have a straight run further west or may be resorted any where in between. Once this group of cars nears its destination the group is broken up until a local RR takes the car to its final destination.
Transfering that to our model railroads for prototypical operation we would want a staging yard were we could create a train that is then run to our smaller yard were the train is then broken down to local deliveries. My dream layout would have say a factory, a dairy/creamery and a meat packing house with oil and coal being delivered also to different sites. I invision a passenger train hauling a milk car that drops off milk cans at the creamery and then freight trains that do the local gathering and switching of full cars for empties and vice a versa. These would then be taken to a local “small” yard where they are grouped and sent off to a larger railroad. My yard would also need ice for the reefer cars. Is my thought process right and has the perverbial light bulb come on? Thanks for any comments or corrections.
Kevin
Sounds good! You want to have a good mix of industries that would logically use those kinds of cars you favor (box cars w/ big slogans for example). You also want to consider the time frame. Your expectation of psgr operation w/ a milk car set out implies pre-1960s, for example, but this also applies to frt. Gas and oil heat pretty well put the kibosh on retail coal dealers after the 60s and the same goes for moving livestock by rail, but you’re definitely on the right track (pun intended)
Quote “Transfering that to our model railroads for prototypical operation we would want a staging yard were we could create a train that is then run to our smaller yard were the train is then broken down to local deliveries.”
I would quibble just a little with the word “create” in connection with staging yard. Staging yard on model railroad is usually a place where trains supposed coming from or going to non-modeled points can be stored or held. Trains not usually made up or “created” in staging except BETWEEN operating sessions.
The visible, working, modeled yard would not necessarily be smaller than the staging yard. Depends on your definition of the word smaller. You might want to have more tracks to hold more trains in staging than tracks in your working yard. But your working yard may have engine terminal, runarounds, switching leads, caboose tracks etc that your staging yard does not need.
Your breakdown of a car load’s progress looks reasonable. It’s about the same as any distribution system.
If you order a loco from Walthers it will be picked from its place on the warehouse shelf into a collecting box (local frreight), taken to a processing point, processed, sent out with a bunch of other orders in a truck… which may have come specially for them or may stop by and pick them up on its way past. You pretty much know the rest. Any rail car is just a big parcel on wheels. Like your loco it has its own paperwork that travels around with it… and someone, somewhere orders it and pays for it.
One issue that I see with designing a layout around “pickup and deliver” is that (to me) it’s a lot like shuffling the cars in a parking lot. There are only so many moves you can make… and they soon get pretty repetative.
If on the other hand you don’t worry too much about what’s in the car(s) but move somewhere downstream a bit you can get to where a whole bunch of cars flow together… and, if you have space, where they flow apart again.
If you really want - and have the space, time and energy - you can design the layout for the trains to re-shuffle among themselves before progressing. There is a huge amount of work in this though and it really does take a lot of resources. My down on this kind of layout is that it is mostly parralel roads, most of the movement is just backwards and forwards and at least half the time you see little more than car roofs. A big yard takes an awful lot of input to build and then more to maintain.
To me it’s much more fun to just have the one or two junctions (three piled together or a third line crossing at grade is better still) with the trains rolling on scene from the off stage “wings” of the staging yards (Which it seems is a MRR term) -once on scene they may roll straight back off - or they may stop to wait a pathway behind other traffic - or