Way back when, there were grain gathering lines all over the plains. A lot of those dead ended at some prairie outpost. Was it more common to have a turntable or a track wye to turn the engines at some dusty end of the line?
I would assume that an Armstrong turntable would be more likely. The road power was usually light and careful placement made the turnaround a bit easier to accomplish.
Looking at track charts and topos of branch lines in Montana, the WYE was the most common method for turning.
Makes sense in flat farm country. Does anybody know an easy way to find
track charts and topos of branch lines in eastern South Dakota on the CNW, Milwaukee Road and Rock Island? I do a lot of exploring in small towns. I like poking around to figure out where the railroad operated and how it affected the layout of the town, things like that.
I expect that a run around on the siding and then operate backward on fairly short branch lines. Kind of the reverse from SP’s cab forwards.
While Dining Car’s assessment is undoubtedly accurate, I, too, would suspect that wyes would be most common when it was necessary to turn equipment.
Constructing the pit, the table itself, and keeping it working (including removing snow) as compared to three very common switches and a few hundred feet of inert track would make me lean toward the wye as a first choice.
Murphy,
I know the Great Northern strongly favored wyes at the end of branch lines. Even if a two or three stall engine house was involved, all it takes is one less switch than stalls.
Mac McCulloch
There were wyes all over the place in western Canada, in addition to the ends of branchlines most junctions had them, as did most larger terminals that also had roundhouses and turntables.
In addition to the snow concerns with a turntable pit, a wye with a 5-10 car long tail could be used to turn an entire plow train or branchline passenger consist. And they are low maintenance compared to a turntable, with all its bearings and perhaps an air or electric motor.
I saw a Santa Fe turntable in Kansas that was built on flat ground without a pit at the end of a branch. The approach track ramped up to get to the turntable.I forget what town it was in, but it was along the Union Pacific west of Ft. Riley.
Mark Vinski
Wye tracks far outnumber turntables.
The USGS website has a topo finder that will allow you to download current and historic topos. Michael Sol’s webiste has track charts for most of the Milwaukee Rd lines.
Here is the historic topo website:
Rock Island track charts. You would want the Northern Division for your area
http://www.multimodalways.org/archives/rrs/CRI&P/CRI&P%20Track%20Charts/CRI&P%20Track%20Charts.html
C&NW track charts.
http://www.multimodalways.org/archives/rrs/C&NW/C&NW%20Track%20Charts/C&NW%20Track%20Charts.html
Milwaukee Road track charts.
https://milwaukeeroadarchives.com/Construction/TrackProfiles.htm
Jeff
(The CB&Q track charts / Lines West start to peter out right where Murphy is at…also on the Multimodalways site)
Thanks for the info and the links guys. I’m spending some quality time falling down ratholes chasing 100 year old rail lines.
Is it still OK to talk about trains and railroads on thsi forum?
I’ve noticed by looking at old maps, Google Earth images, photos and also by observation in the field that Rock Island built their lines to a lot lower standards in my area than the Milwaukee, CNW, Great Northern and even Illinois Central. Most times I can follow where an old line used to be. The Rock Island lines around here (SD, MN, IA area) were mostly grain gathering branch lines. They are the ones most likely to have reverted to farmland. It looks like they did minimal cut and fill, so the trains 100 years ago must have been roller coasters.
Railroads were built to the level of financing the companies building them had. If the company had a sound financial base the line would be constructed to a higher level of engineering and execution. If the company was chicken scratching for every nickel and dime it could find the line was laid on top of the ground in the cheapest way possible.
Can one suppose that the level of financing had something to do with the projected level of financial returns? That if there were strong prospects for railroad traffic that there would be incentive to spend the money to build the line to a standard allowing movement of that traffic at a lower operating cost?
The grain-gathering branch lines are problematic in that regard inasmuch as the traffic is largely that one bulk commodity, and the traffic is highly seasonal, with the investment in roadbe
Keep in mind that there were many different reasons to build railroads, and many different things that were forced by the sometimes awful financial resources and practices of the day.
Very common was the idea of building the line as cheaply and expeditiously as possible, just to get it open (whereupon it would be vastly superior, even rickety, to the previous alternatives) and then devote some of the revenue stream to continuous improvement of one meaningful kind or another … rather than dividends. There is a strong line of argument that this is the approach the Chicago- New York Air Line should have pursued … laying interurban track and preserving the faster ROW for build-out as finances improved after 1907, while preferentially building the ‘telpher’ part of the system which required much less heroic engineering. (It would be highly interesting to see the market for robot package express in the modern age…)
People who understood practical possibilities of railroading better, like Jim Hill, could take ‘two streaks of rust’ systems, update them in particular cost-effective ways, and then combine them effectively. Say what you want about some of the robber barons, they knew how to build systems that could run trains well enough to make consistent money for the shareholders even in competitive conditions.
Most of the ‘highly seasonal’ traffic was developed when there was no practical alternative to steam railroading to give it access to shipping. You will note how devastating the effect of motor-vehicle development was to that in the agricultural market, and the development of alternative heating fuels was in the mineral market. There are some similarities with commuter service, but also some differences, one of them being the practical political value of subsidy vs. service
A branch line with a turntable at the end of the branch… can anyone think of one, anywhere in the US?
There used to be a MILW branch in southwestern Wisconsin that ended at Benton at a turntable.