I am planning on putting a roundhouse inside this curved part of my layout. It is 64" in diameter. The plan is for two tracks to the turntable and off one of those I would like to have a service siding to put in a coaling tower,water tower and sanding tower. I would also like to have an ash pit. My questions are.
Would the ash pit be on the same service track as the coaling tower etc or on a separate track again?
2, How long should I make the service track for appearance purposes. Were the towers usually close together or spread out?
Thanks for your help and if you have pics of your service area please post them.
With two tracks leading to the turntable, one would be for inbound locomotives and one for outbounds. Services would typically be along the inbound track. A typical arrangement leading to the turntable would be first the ash dump, then water plug, coaling tower, sand house, and lastly wash rack. Ideally, these facilities would be spread so that a locomotive say being serviced at the coaling tower wouldn’t interfere with a locomotive receiving sand, and so on.
You should have a third track (which needn’t be connected to the turntable) adjacent/parallel to the inbound track for bringing in loads of coal and sand and taking out ashes. Those would be busy industries requiring lots of car movements, especially for coal deliver.
Well typically tracks never really did run behind the round house such as your planing, but rather they were most likely at the end of a yard sometimes at the end of a freight yard even.Unfortunately though it’s one of the pit falls we have to endure as model railroaders. We need to make things we want fit in the space we have to work with. Marty McGuirk has an excellent book on Engine servicing facilities which lays out the position of things like the coaling tower, ash pits, sand tower and drying house etc.
There are several variables to consider, are you modeling modern or semi modern era diesels only, steam or transition with both steam and diesel locomotives? If your modeling diesels only then there would be no need for a coaling tower unless you want to depict what once was.
I would not put the coaling tower if used too close to the turn table and the ash pit on a separate track but not completely necessary.
I have included a few shot of my servicing terminal partially in mock up, which is what I suggest you try to do. You’ll notice one pic has the coaling tower much closer to the turntable and round house and another with it much farther away. I felt it looked too compressed when it was closer so I opted to have it reside at almost the entrance to the yard. The last pic shows all the lead in tracks I have the luxury of being able to put in place. The svc. module is on a 3’x8’ section with a 3’x4’ yard before it. Some friends ahev commented that it’s a waste of valuable space but you know what I pay the bills on this railroad so thats they way I built it.
When you come down to it there is no one set way it has to be it’s how best you can make it fit and look acceptable. Do a fewf Google image searches for locomotive servings facilities and get some ideas.
If you can access enough back issues of MR, RMC and even the full scale mags, or some of the books available dealing with servicing facilities, you might find something that is close to fitting the area you have available. There is a huge variety available, both in the more traditional setouts described here, through some rather unusual informal facilities, up to some very major facilities handling multiple heavy articulateds in the steam era, to formal heavy duty class 1 terminals for current generation diesel, down to diesels getting their fuel from a tank truck driven up to trackside. I remember Trains and model trains magazine actually showing some shortline facilities where tenders were filled using a trackside conveyor fed from a dump truck, sand was had loaded, and water came through a hose from a trackside faucet.
And servicing facilities aren’t just a the ends of yards or terminals. The rail to ship transfer and a local steel plant in my home town were serviced by a B&O yard facility. The engine facility was actually at the entrance to the yard, almost 4 miles from, the lake, with a large wooden coaling trestle, water cranes, and sand facility on one side of the main and the turntable, 10 or 12 stall roundhouse, water cranes, and ashpit on the other side. There were two large water towers behind the trestle without attached spouts. This facility was home to about 5 or 6 L class 0-8-0s, and daily serviced at least two EM-1 2-8-8-4, and later Geeps, Baldwin RF-16s,and newer diesels. Now, there’s only a minor diesel facility, almost no buildings, but the turntablle is still there, and used to turn the diesels.
