I have a Freight depot on my layout that I’m trying to correctly position, but I need help with a specific question:
Were the receiving platforms next to the track always designed so that the top of the platforms were always level with the floor of a boxcar? Or, was this generally practiced but not always the case?
I thought I had seen pictures of ramps being used on occasion for loading and unloading cars, in order to bridge any discrepancies in height. Is that just my imagination?
Well gee, the word “always” covers so much ground that I doubt if anyone is capable of really answering. I guess the better counter-question would be, why wouldn’t such a platform be at the height of the boxcar floor? What reason or advantage would there be for it being significantly higher or lower? I can’t think of any, especially with a freight depot which has to handle such a wide and unpredictable variety of loads.
Paul Dolkos, elsewhere on the Trains.com website, has written about platform heights (with good photos to illustrate his points): “Recommended heights range from 3’3” for what’s known as a low refrigerator car platform, 3’5" for autos, 3’9" for freight, and 4’ for a high refrigerator platform."
Note from this website http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/loadbox.Html the bridge plate that bridges the gap from platform to boxcar floor. While some variance in height would be tolerable, at some point differences too great would be an invitation to trouble such as dropped loads, maybe even turning over the small tractor or carts (since they might well go through this car to get to one on a further track):
Finally, I cannot resist including this wonderful photo which shows w
I wonder if car size was a factor?? Remember car heights went from 6’ to 10’ from 1890 to 1935. I don’t know that the interior floor height of a 6’ car, an 8’ car and a 10’ car would all be exactly the same or not.
Remember too that generally only large freight houses would use forklifts and such. In smaller towns a car or two would be spotted to be unloaded by hand, I’m sure it would be OK if the car interior was a few inches higher than the platform.
Thanks for the pictures and the comments. [:)] They are both very helpful.
Right now, my Freight depot is sitting next to the mainline and my track (HO) is up on cork road bed. Even with strips of N-scale corking sheeting under the depot, the trackside platform only comes up to the bottom of the boxcar container. So, to bring it up to close the same level, it looks like I’ll have to either add more N-scale or matching HO-scale cork sheeting underneath the depot.
I don’t want to get neurotic about the height but I would like for it to be fairly prototypical. It just seems the foundation around the Freight depot really has to be elevated, compared to the other buildings and structures on the layout.
One very common item, used almost everywhere, was the two-wheeled hand truck. With an unloading ramp it could handle a small height mismatch, probably up to 6 inches.
In Japan, freight platforms were deliberately built about 120mm lower than the standard car floor height. Japanese gondolas of my era had drop sides, rather like large pickup truck end gates, and clearance had to be left for those drop sides to come down level for loading and unloading of crated and packaged items. OTOH, passenger high platforms (standard everywhere) were within a very few millimeters of car floor height.
As I suggested in your parallel thread in the Layout Forum, the problem imay not be that the ground isn’t high enough, it may be that the building is too short. Normally a freight depot is constructed on a high enough foundation (that is a stone/brick/concrete/wood piling base) so that the platform and the doors to the freight house are level with the car floors.
Rather than build up a hill to set the freight house on, I would suggest actually raising the foundation, the building itself. The ground would remain level with to ground the track sits on or at least the top of the ties. You would add strips of styrene, wood or a block of foam under teh footprint of the depot, paint to represent stone/brick/block/concrete/wood or build up pilings tso support the freight house and its platforms.
A lot of modelers that use roadbed on their main line trackage do not use the roadbed in their yards or sidings. They allow the track to taper down to a lower level (base table top) and use a cork sheet to help shim up the trackage for their buildings.
As mentioned above they also redo the building base to raise it to a proper height for buildings placed right next to the main line.
Bridge plates were commonly used to span the gap from building to railcar. They were used to span the gaps between cars when loading through one car into another when cars were spotted on parrallel tracks.
In general terms the platforms are supposed to be the same exact level. I don’t see why there should be a difference in height, or elso what sense does it make to build the darn platforms.
