Philosophy Friday - Car Floats

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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“Car Floats”

Start with a big frosted mug, add two scoops of chocolate ice cream, add root beer… uh, wait, wrong kind of float! Railroads were noted for their ingenuity and resourcefulness when it came to ways to transport cars and cargo. A big river or lake in the way? No problem, just use a boat. On a model railroad, ships and railroad barges can add a lot of scenic and operating interest. Plus it provides a marvelous opportunity to introduce traffic onto the layout-- particularly if the layout falls just a smidgeon shy of being another Miniatur Wunderland or Northlandz.

So My Questions For Today Are:

– Do you have any nautical shipping facilities on your layout? Do you use a car ferry or barge to load up trains and ship them to far off destinations? Do you use a car ferry to add operational interest to your layout?

– If so, tell us about your setup. How has it added or enhanced your operations?

– Do you have any pictures of your facilities?

As usual, I’m looking forward to your comments and opinions!

John

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This has been a dream of mine for quite a few years. I never thought I could fit one in, but with some careful track-twisting there is now a viable design for my car float terminal.

I can show you pictures of the boxes of the Walthers car float kit, along with the matching apron. So far, they’re just kits. But, even that’s an accomplishment, because, after bringing these long-retired items back for another run, they stopped making them again. I was lucky enough to find the float kit at Trainworld, after Walthers themselves reported them gone.

The problem with a car float terminal, I realized when I started planning one, is the amount of space you need for the associated yard. Assuming that the car float will arrive full, and that there will be an equal number of cars waiting for a cruise of their own, you need at least as much storage for cars as the float itself will hold, plus some additional empty track to do the switching on. Simplistically, you need to pull a string of cars and store it, and then replace that with another string, and so on. So, for a 3-track float, you need 4 tracks of yard.

This will be an urban scene on my layout. I’m planning to run the tracks through a warehouse district, with a few bars and other disreputable establishments. There will be some street running and some cobblestone pavement. In keeping with the theme of my layout in Moose Bay, this part will be called Mooseport.

Really starting in a serious manner is a good 6 to 12 months away, though. Sometimes, the amount of pink foam on the rest of the layout is just overwhelming.

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Reading a book (lost in my last move) on Northern California dog hole harbors and their logging operations inspired me to change how I viewed Chuck Yungkurth’s famous “Gum Stump & Snowshoe” track plan.

Prior to reading the book, I saw no easy way to expand the track plan to make any sense, even on a proto-lance basis. After reading the book, and reading Mallets on the Mendocino Coast, I came to see a slightly expanded lower terminal of the plan as a possible LDE for a dog hole port dock. Then the switchback up a cliff from the dock area made some sense, and further expansion out either end of the upper level would also be reasonable.

Furthermore, by setting the dog hole port and associated railway no later than 1900, it could still be served by working sail schooners. Looking at the dockside scene through the rigging of a schooner would be rather special, although impractical for manual uncoupling.

Thus, the basic concept for Port Orford of the HOn3 Port Orford & Elk River Railway & Navigation Co was born. An online search of the topographic maps and charts of today’s Port Orford revealed a cliff with a shelf near sea level on the NW side of the port would fit the topography of the track plan without too much departure from reality.

I have to admit I chickened out at trying to model a high line lumber transfer like the Caspar and many other logging operations used at the dog hole harbors. Besides, using a dock instead of a high line enabled the ships to bring cargo in as well as take lumber out. And there would be more switching operations associated with a dock than with a high line.

One of these days I would like to experiment with a fog machine, and the ambient sounds of a harbor with schooners loading and unloading. Maybe even a whiff of salt air, mixed with coal or wood smoke. In the meantime, I’

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The layout I “am building” in spurts (I am between spurts while working on a history paper) has/will have nautical shipping facilities around three of the rooms four sides. General dry cargo docks, banana dock, grain elevator, sulphur terminal, bulk material dock (ore, etc), shell dredging facility, drydock, open dock. All of the ships except for some shrimpboats and a barge or two in drydock will be background pictures. EVERYTHING in this photo is painted or glued on the backdrop except the cars and track.

My prototype. , had two carferry operations in different periods. In the early 20th century, had a LONG carferry between and the to handle cargo that came from . In mid 20th century, there was a carferry across the

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No car ferries or floats. But a small river barge terminal. In principle it works like a team track - it is a general traffic source and destination for car loads of various kinds - tank cars, box cars, flat cars, gondola.

Still have not gotten around to making it look better - it works, though:

Fellow railroader Svein pulling a cut of empty cars from the grain unloading shed at the end of the rightmost track. A tank car spotted for loading at the left track. Oil comes in by barge.

In the right background a coal barge is ready to start unloading (once cars have been spotted to receive the load) - there is a mobile crane behind the unloading shed. This is also where boxcar barges will be loaded from flatcars or flatcars loaded from boxcar barges.

At far left, at higher elevation - the river yard - just three double ended tracks, which functions both as a minimum amount of open staging for a couple of trains, and as a place to temporarily leave leave cars while switching the barge terminal.

Smile,
Stein

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I think car floats and ferries make for really great operations and extend the railroad like nothing else - you can have several floats loaded and interchange them. My RR will have one eventually. I have the apron built but not the support for the interchangeable floats.

Ferries are great too. I operated a RR that modeled the Ann Arbor RR and the Green Bay and Western, with one deck for each. The ferries were modeled after the real boats, 4 tracks each, and were mounted on rolling carts with telescoping supports so they could reach both decks. The boats would “sail” when full across the room (which was Lake Michigan!) to the other deck for unloading.

Operations were strict - use idler flat cars to keep the loco off the apron and load alternate tracks one car at a time. On the prototype the boat list would twist the ramp and so it had to be controlled or in extreme cases the boat would flip.

A good layout designer (not me!) could do something similar with operations across the Detroit River with a number of railroads.

George V.

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For moi, Two such river-based industries stand. One was a boat builder, who made everything from speedboats to Sailing vessels to those Coaast Guard river cutters that Athearn has on float cars. The other was Coal offloading. The Powerplant in Madison gets its coal via barge, and the railroad used to also obtain some of that to take North (up the Hill) to the Mental Hospital up there. I might continhue that into the future, we’ll see.

Madison IN used to be a booming rivertown, but after the railroads started biuilding bridges, a lot of that was lost.

When I still had Dad though, our layouts were to be “connected” via a carflaot. The railraod at his house would have one, as would whatever switching thingy I;d end up with when I moved outg and into life. That flaot might get modelled for no real good reaosn or destination though besides the sentiment.

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John - Like most of the previous posters, my carfloat operation does not yet actually exist, but it is definitely a planned part of the layout extension that I am currently working on. I’m employing and already have in-hand a couple of special idler flats, a Walthers’ carfloat apron/bridge and instead of their very large plastic carfloat, I’m using a shorter, solid resin, one made by Model Tech Studios. This smaller carfloat, designed to carry 6-8 36’-40’ cars, allows for a much more compact scene. In addition to the dock area, apron/bridge and float, the scene will include a small yard only large enough to store a handful of cars at any given time. I shot photos of the real riverside location of the old carfloat operation a few weeks ago, at the height of autumn’s colors, to serve as a 24"x42" background to the scene. It includes the eastern side of the Hudson River with the river’s channel through the Hudson Highlands in the distance.

In my particular case, the scene is logical and fully justified in that it depicts an actual situation that existed just outside the City of Beacon (NY) long ago. There, carfloats carried the ND&C’s rail traffic across the Hudson River to Newburgh prior to the building of the famous Poughkeepsie RR Bridge (which was never built in my layout’s scenario). On my layout, the trans river carfloat connection to the Erie RR is the destination for about 75% of the Beacon-bound rail traffic.

With luck, I may have this portion of the layout completed and in operation by summer 2011.

CNJ831

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Yep, I’ve got a Car Float operation on my layout. (The layout is still under construction, but I am now having regular operating sessions at least once a month.)

My RR is called The Chesapeake and Atlantic, a freelance RR located in the East, and I model and use a Car Float operation to extend my RR. The Floats are actually used as staging where I can send any types of cars. Right now I have two Car Floats but will probably make another one later that is larger. They are built on a 1x4 board, detailed some, and hold two tracks. Each one holds 6 to 8 cars max. The cars unload and load to and from a small yard in the area that I call the Car Float Yard, of course. The Float Bridge is actually a Pontoon type, and built on a layout peninsula that acts as a pier. The pier also has a Coal Dock, a proposed Export Grail Elevator, and a yet-to-be-built pier warehouse.

(I live on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and there is a real Car Float operation at Cape Charles that goes across the Chesapeake Bay to Norfolk. That was one reason I decided to model one.)

This is the peninsula (and me).

The main Pier.

This photo also shows my lift bridges by the door in the up position.

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Well it would be hard to model the Mid Atlantic without a car float operation of one type or another, so yes I have plans for one too and already have all the various Walthers components.

In the previous version of my layout, which is now being disassembled to make way for a somewhat modular, movable version, a large water front scene filled about 8’ x 8’ on the end of a lower level penisula.

It was connected to the rest of the layout via a belt line that left from the main freight yard.

Taking a sight detour in this story, the old layout had lots of hidden track, was double decked, and had very complex benchwork that would have made moving it impossible. So when we decided retirement would take us elsewhere, I stopped construction and began redesigning a “moveable” layout.

The orginal layout did allow for a large number of distict features to be visually seperate from other unrelated scenes. The price for this was construction complexity and hidden track - two things the new version cannot have.

So, back to the car float and water front - I have decided to leave the waterfront out of the new layout, BUT will build it as a seperate switching layout and hopefully “attach” it to the main layout after the move. While the current train room, 23 x 40 above my detached garage, is not large enough to fit in the water front and all the other desired features, I do have an empty basement and several empty rooms in the house where the car float/water front layout can be built if I get to it before we move.

The move, while a definate plan, does not have an exact date - maybe a year or two - maybe six years when my wife can fully retire - all depends on how far from here we decide to go.

So, my plan is to keep on modeling and be able to take all my efforts with me, two years from now, or 10 years from now. I have vowed to never “tear down” another layout. And, as a side note, I cannot ever see myself tearing down a layout just to do something differerent.

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I have one car float built and semi-installed, tested and working to a point, I plan another and swap barges for traffic variation.

I am planning absolute minimum hidden track as possible no staging yards, no helixes…using “No-Lixes” design to change levels.

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Content removed due to a completely fucked up and incompetent Kalmbach customer service.

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I can’t take credit for this, other than as the photographer. It’s a pair of car floats at the Treasure Coast club in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

It’s a beautiful scene, and some of the best “dirty water” modeling I’ve ever beheld. There are two floats and two aprons, and plenty of yard space around them. They are the Walthers models, I believe.

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As a former Merchant Marine cadet from New York City, I was very conscious of the various Port of New York car float termini and routes operated by the railroads back a half century ago. When I was planning a layout based on my home town (which was intended to have a model of the Hell Gate Bridge, among other improbabilities) car float operations were definitely part of the scheme.

Then fate intervened. By the time I last visited NYC (in 1962) my prototype choice had shifted from NYC to JNR. A few years later it settled down in a spectacularly scenic mountain region half a kilometer or more above sea level and a couple of mountain ranges (one of which includes Fujisan) inland. In the Upper Kiso Valley, the only watercraft are kayaks, occupied by paddlers living out death wishes.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Even with beaucoup staging, there wasn’t going to be enough track space for all of my rolling stock on my under construction layout. The solution? Cassettes, and a cassette dock connected to one staging yard throat in the Netherworld. So, even though there’s no resemblance to a prototype car float dock, I get to operate just like one when I need to swap cars on and off the layout. I doubt that I would have thought of that idea if I hadn’t seen those tall-stacked steam tugs plowing along with loaded car floats on each side, 'way back when…

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)