I do not have any pictures and I can only tell about my experiences some 50 yeqrs ago. I worked, as a young, strong punk, in the petroleum warehouse of the Albuquerque Chevron terminal. Wow 50 years ago I could squat and pick up a drum of oil that was lying on the floor on it's chines. Our packaged products were 55gl drums of oil and/or grease, cases of quarts, 5gl pails of oil and grease, and other types of packages such as 120lb kegs of grease and/or gear oil. The full drums of lube oil weighed in at 440lbs and a drum of grease was around 470 lbs.. Our product came in from Chevron blending/packaging plant located in Richmond, CA, via AT&SF all the way. Damage was so bad sometimes we would find a puddle of lube oil on ground under the railcar because of a leaking damaged drum of oil or maybe more. Damage, this was back in the late '60's to early '70's, was so bad that ATSF had an inspector witness the loading at Richmond and then that same inspector would come to Albuquerque to witness the opening of the car on our end. All I can say is unbelievable what could be done to drums and cardboard cases, WOW ! I have no clue as to these cars going through a hump yard, I don't think they did however. I went to driving trucks and got out of that mess so do not know if the problems were ever figured out and fixed.
It's not surprising that, in the drive for more fuel efficiency, weight is being stripped wherever possible from road vehicles, including semi-trailers. Often overall weight bearing ability is preserved while point loading capacity is sacrificed. As is the case in the "unzipped" trailer, the walls are part of the support structure along with the undercarriage, allowing the undercarriage to be lightened up considerably. Sometimes all it takes is a forklift striking the wall, weakening that connection to the undercarriage, and the whole trailer self-disassembles. Just compare the weight of an empty container plus road chassis with that of an empty, equal-weight-capacity box trailer. There are no free lunches.
Yes indeed. Sometimes trailer buyers decline extra cost beefier construction where the sidewalls meet the floor. If these trailers are deployed in service with heavy commodities like rolls of paper, the walls get lightly bumped bumped in loading. This eventually bows out the trailer walls in the perimeter all around the floor. Dollars saved in the build end up shortening the life of the trailer.
I am certainly no expert on yard operations but from my many years of observations of the hump yard at NS DeButts Yard in Chattanooga, I can give you a reasonable idea f what was happening there in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. Once a train entered the reviving yard, it was usually broken in half since a normal train was about twice the length of the receiving tracks. Once there and staged, the hump power would couple on to start the humping process. As cars went over the hump, they would head down into the appropriate tracks for the destination. The tracks in the bowl were designated for either another yard an interchange destination. Most of the time there were two tracks for each set up. Cars that had a local destination had their own track. As the bowl tracks would fill, the cuts of cars would be moved over to the departure yard for assembly into a full train and head out. Meanwhile the cars destine for local stops would be pulled and then flat switched into the locals yard and sorted there very muck like we do using car cards and staging trains or layout operating sessions. There are probably some folks on the board here that could give a much more in depth description of these types of yard operations than I but that is a decent overview. As it relates to the loads we were talking about, often times cars get humped and flat switched creating many opportunities for shifted or damaged loads. That has lead to some neat innovations that we see advertised on real cars and our models. The SP or Cotton Belt Hydra Cushion cars and the Santa Fe Shock Control cars are good examples. M/T did some cool models of cars that were used by several roads that used to demonstrate improper car handling. Somewhere way back early in this tread, there is a picture of one of the M/T cars.
That's interesting @BNSF FAN . Once a car rolled down the hump into a track, I'd never given much thought to further car sorting and train assembly.
So back to car loads. I was happy enough with the M/T truck frames load that I decided to do a second one. It's an easy kit and this second set should o a little faster than the first set. Here they are with the wood frames added to the tops and then the bottoms. Still have the chains to add and then they will be ready to load out. I put he last set on a BN flat and I'm thinking this set will go on a TTX flat.
Yeah, after thinking about it, and reading your exquisite response, it seems logical that there would be a local yard where the local delivery train would be assembled and dispatched. Thank you for the info!
More about loads. Another car I recently worked on was a bulkhead flat. Added the M/T wooden deck but wasn't too sure about a load for the car. In going through the workbench desk, I found a pole load that fit nicely. Not the greatest load but I kind of like it. Car is on the ready track and at least for now, good to go. Next up are some loads for auto racks. I toyed with this before on one rack but I didn't secure the cars so they shifted when I stored the rack and really didn't want to shift back. I figured out a good fix for this would to make some false floors like i did recently for a gondola and secure the cars to those. Here are all the parts to get started. Below, we see enough false floors for 4 racks, the cars for one rack and of course, the first victim rack with the end door removed. Next up, I attached the first set of cars to the false floors with some Aleen's Clear Tacky Gel and left them to dry In our next episode, we'll install them in the rack and figure out how to get a pic where you can see the silhouette of the car load through the auto rack panels.
Clever idea but can you see into the autorack at all? Btw toured a Lansing Oldsmobile plant a ways back and autos were loaded on three levels. Two levels was for minivans and SUVs.
Those are the intermountain racks and when the light hits them right, you can tell if they are loaded or not. Plus it adds a little weight to them which is good too. You are right on the bi-level racks being mainly for SUV's and Pick ups. The thing is those as are cheap enough to be able to make the loads for 4 racks. Maybe someday when I get a 3d printer, they will get upgraded to the correct vehicles or someone will come out with a cheap 40 pack of SUV's or Pick Ups
Oh my gosh, I can't think at that level of detail. That's a very clever solution you have mounting the vehicles on a removable strip. BTW, you can consign either of those silver two door coupes to any point on my railroad.
I haven't looked in on this thread in a while. Man, I've missed a lot of good stuff. Love the loads. They're excellent, especially the truck frames and the pole load. As far as the Oxford vehicles are concerned, they're a nice product. I've bought a number of their HO (actual 1/87) vehicles and have been very pleased with them, although to date they haven't produced anything newer than the early '70s in that scale. As far as the British N scale goes , it doesn't look out of place, especially if attention is not called to it.
So glad to find this thread! I'm going through a few posts (53 pages will take some time), and extremely happy to see you and some others are using Unitrack. I don't know if you're using the snap track with the roadbed, but I'm guessing all Unitrack is code 80? I decided not to go with code 55.. I want anyone to be able to run trains on my layout and have read about code 55 causing problems for older rolling stock with deeper flanges. @BNSF FAN what did you mean in your 1st post about using crates for storage of "everything vertical" from your old layout? If you meant storage of structures, I'd love to hear an alternative to what I've done with mine for 30 years... shelf life, collecting dust.
Welcome Glen, glad you found this humble thread. My modeling skills are no where near what many folk here have but I've had a lot of fun with it so far. Hope you enjoy the read. I know it's all in what people like but for me, the switch to Unitrack was one of the best things I've done. We are close to 4 years of being able to operate trains on the current layout and I have had no track issues at all. As for the crates, wow, all the way back to the first post. Had to go check it to jog my memory. What that was about was when we were preparing our old house for sale, it was time to take down the layout, and the anything vertical referred to mainly buildings and trees. I removed what I could of those and boxes them up. Used several storage boxes and a lot of styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap. Since the layout was built on hollow core doors, I was able to easily separate it into sections. Again like I said in the first post, I got some great advice from fellow TB members here on ways to store those sections. Using a combination of 1x4 lumber and cardboard, I built crates for each section so that they could be stored and moved with less risk of damage. I never though at the time to take pics of that. It worked well but I ended up not using them again and eventually dismantled them and salvaged what I could. I sold off all the switches (or turnouts if you will) and gifted all the flex track to a friend. Hope that helps.
Fun is what this is all about! Very cool loads! The only auto racks I have do not have any see through at all. They are mostly the Kato Auto-Train cars. Very well done!
Yes, very helpful. I received an item recently packed with those cylindrical peanuts. I have 1 structure with a fire escape and have an idea abt using some hot glue and those peanuts to make a wrap around carton nest of some sort. I'll definitely be using Unitrack. I have some new sections, enough for an oval, but I bought the 11" curved track before realizing I can use 12 3/8" on my layout (depth of layout is 28"), so I guess I'll have some extra track to trade or sell. My biggest challenge will be working a Central Valley 150' Platt truss bridge into the plan, but Unitrack has some adapters to allow use with other brands of track. Thanks for the reply, enjoy the weekend
You could double-track your oval with the 11R curves on the inner loop. Add a double crossover, or a couple of opposing (L & R) single crossovers, to traverse back and forth between inner and outer loops.
You're right, I didn't think about that. Each radius fits outside the previous. I won't be using it with this layout, but you've convinced me to hang on to it for what I may do in the future. I'm pretty sure our city still holds a yearly model railroad event inside the old depot. Smaller displays are great for that, since space is limited. Also a great way to run 2 trains in limited space on standard DC for those of us on non-DCC budgets. Many thanks for sharing the idea
