Wye - former Santa Fe (now Grand Canyon Railway) has a wye at the Grand Canyon end. Don’t know how the train is turned at Williams.
Loop (balloon) - there is a reversing loop around the lower-level platform tracks at Grand Central Terminal. Don’t know if it is currently in use.
Then, the model.
At my (temporarily nameless) end-of-track module the one single-ended passenger car and some, “Unload from this side,” freight cars and single-ended brake vans are turned on the turntable in the engine servicing area. Locomotives, however, are never turned. The TTT runs tank locos with excellent visibility both ways, and the Road Foreman of Engines figures that keeping water over the crown sheets on the 4% grades trumps running smokebox first.
In the bottom of a steep-sided valley, there’s no room for even a minimum-radius loop or wye.
I understand that the loop at GCT is used, but mostly for locomotives and mow work and work trains. Metro North (Meatball Norsk) is the only railroad there, and all of their trains are electric MU or Dual Mode push pulls. The Meatball does run some diesel only - three car shuttle trains but AFIK they never travel to GCT.
AMTK trains from Boston by pass GCT via the Hell Gate Bridge into NYP.
Sometimes you can see New Jersey Transit trains on Hell Gate Bridge running all the way to New Haven. They have a deal with Meatball Norsk to run trains to the football games at the Meadowlands.MN has no equipment that can go into NYP, NJT does have such equipment and it is even compatible with the wires in CT which have different power than the ones in Jerseyland.
Back in the train most passenger consist was taken apart.
Mail cars went to the USPS building,REA Express cars to the REA building,coaches to the clean out track,Pullmans to the Pullman tracks along with the Sleepers.Dinners and Sleepers to be clean,sterilized and given a health inspection(this was to insure all was cleaned) the dinner was taken to commissary building for restocking…About three hours before train time the train would be built and taken to the station.A carman would connect all steam and signal lines.Pullman porters would board and inspect their cars to insure everything they needed was stocked-blankets,sheets,extra pillows shoe polish(passengers would set their shoes outside their compartment if they wanted them polish).60 mintues before train time the passenger locomotive(s) would be coupled to the train and air pumped up and heat or A/C would be turned on in the passenger cars…Some trains had barbers.
There was far more to handling passenger trains then just turning on a loop…
Since the opening of the Empire connection in 1991, Amtrak train NEVER had a presenece at GCT?
Have you looked at the photos or viewed the video links?
Yes or no?
I can recall at least two periods in which they did (albeit TEMPORARILY). GCT serves as an option if conditions prevent Amtrak from using the Empire connecting line between Penn and Spuyten Duyvil.
I will even go out on a limb and speculate that the Amtrak trains used the loop at GCT (or at least to turn the engines) for the Empire trains. These trains (although normally serviced at Sunnyside) could afford to temporarily be serviced at Albany when trains were running out of GCT during the closure of the Empire connecting line.
To acknowledge something else you posted, you are correct. The Amtrak and MN pick-ups are different and not compatible (I forgot about that). As shown in the videos I shared, MN likely lashes up one of its locomotives to the front of the train to ferry it in and out of GCT. I’m not sure where they cut it off although one of the photos I posted show the train with no MN unit in front headed for the Park Ave tunnel. I’m not sure what happened there. Perhaps the MN unit was waiting just outside the tunnels.
MN unit in front headed for the Park Ave tunnel. I’m not sure what happened there. Perhaps the MN unit was waiting just outside the tunnels.
On the picture that you posted with the AMTK unit in the lead, I could not see the 125th Street station. There was probably an MN locomotive waiting for it at 125th Street.
LIONS never worry about “never” or “sometimes” or “could do.” When LION says they had no presence at GCT he means that they had no ticket office, or other accouterments of passenger train operations there. If something went it that way, it would have used to loop to turn the train. They could hire MN cleaners and car-knockers to inspect the train, but there would be nobody there to restock the commissary.
Indeed, when I still lived in NYC in the 80s, LIRR used AMTK car-knockers at NYP since the host railroad is usually the one to provide these services in their stations. Now that LIRR has the West Side Yard, they probably take care of this sort of stuff out there.
Yup. One could build a very nice railroad with only a nice passenger terminal and a staging yard to represent “out there”.
On my previous layout “The King’s Express” would arrive at Fornost, and be broken up as you described. By the time it reached Fornost it only had a pair of Alco PA1s on the point, a baggage car, three coaches, a diner and one sleeper. There were were yard tracks to receive these cars for the work that you described, and then, around 9:30 am (after the regional and commuter trains cleared the station) they would assemble “The King” for its southbound trip to Gondor.
It left around 11:30 to arrive at Bree at 12:50. The Northbound “King” would meet it there, as well as both the eastbound and westbound sections of the “North Star Express” (Blue Mountain to Lonely Mountain). Thus any point in Midd