Special Industrial building

Model Railroader Prototype information for the modeler
1

Hello,

I’m looking for pictures and the Model Railroader article of some special industrial buildings: in this article one or more buildings in an industrial switching area were shown where parts of the building have been cut away to make room for the railroad.

Unfortunately I can’t find the MR article anymore and, as a non-native speaker, I don’t know what to search for on the MR site and/or Google.

Could someone please give me a hint on this?

Kind regards from Germany

Michael.

2

Guten Tag Micheal, Your description makes me think of several articles by Robert Smaus.

The October 1989 Model Railroader, page 70, has an article on his 3’ x 11’ city switching layout, which shows his “Philips Poultry Co” which has a curved track running between the building.

The February 1988 Model Railroader, page 114, has an article with more detail on how he kitbashed the building.

Hope this is of assistance,

Cheers,the Bear.

3

This is actually fairly common (or was in older industrial buildings) where the building wall were designed to curve in order to handle sidings, spurs, or even mainlines - heck, the old Bush Terminal /Cross Harbor (now NYRJ) in Brooklyn, NY alone has several buildings where this was done, including the (fairly) famous 2nd Avenue curve under the corner of a warehouse* (this portion of the line is now out-ot-service, being replaced by a more direct connection up First Avenue) - edit, I found an image of a Cross Harbor switcher traversing that corner) There were also I think at least 2 buildings along First Avenue alone where the walls curved to handle a freight siding servicing those buildings (sadly, these are now Out of Service, but the curved walls remain as an easy ROW spotting feature). There were/are many, many other examples.
The (somewhat famous in NY nowadays) NYC Highline on the West Side of Manhattan (build in the 1930s, now a “linear” urban walking trail/park) had plenty of examples of this too - I remember reading old National Geographics in the college library, in one of them (c1940 I think) I first saw that picture of the train passing THRU the Bell Labs building - IIRC, the track at that point was isolated from the structure (a bridge within a bridge I guess)

4

Hello,

thanks for the link to Bush Terminal and this special warehouse. This is what I’m looking for. Are there more of those picture available? The site you mentioned (http://members.trainweb.com/bedt/indloco/nynjr.html) is really great. But how can I find more of those pictures?

I think in MR 2009…2011 there was an article from a similar place. Unfortunately I can not find it. Does someone know this article?

BTW, I’m modeling a US style switching layout and can not just visit such a place :frowning:

Kind regards

Dampffan

5

Since this was very common in North America (buildings w/ curved walls to accomodate ROW, you could use Bing to aerial view along current ROWs, and find what you want such as this

Oh, and those two buildings on First Avenue I mentioned before (there are many others) - thing 1 and thing 2 - of course, some schmuck had to park a semi in front of that second one, which I think is really what you wanted, as the Google camera van passed by, so here’s the Bing aerial view)

Such configurations were done across the US, for example the SP “Rat Hole” division in Los Angeles

Any, as you can see, the construction of “curved” wall building to accomdate sidings is fairly straight-foward - most were made up of angled walls along the siding ROW, so

  1. lay the track in question on you layout,
  2. roll the longest piece of rolling stock you plan to run along that track, and mark the maximum clearances needed on both sides (possibly by taping or rubber banding pencils to the side of the car (wagon) - probably the ends - maybe check clearances with 2 long cars coupled together)
  3. on the building side(s), draw straight lines outside of the clearance zone, close so the walls are near the tracks, but the cars (wagon) won’t hit the walls going in and out of the siding. Keep the number of angled walls to a minimum, as you can see th
6

Many thanks for all replies.

This helps me a lot

Regards

Dampffan

7

Here is a building I made for a Hobby shop display layout back in 1987. This was based on a port area warehouse in Corpus Christi that had buildings laid out with corners cut off to accommodate tight curves of waterfront trackage.

This was easy because I didn’t have to kitbash. I just got an inch-thick plank the size of the foundation, built up a framework of scale 6x8s, made a skin of cardboard and covered with Campbells corrugated sheet cut into scale sheets.