I'm looking for track plans for small to medium sized freight yards. Any photos or links that I could browse through would be greatly appreciated. I tried looking through the rail images, but couldn't find an efficient way to search for what I was looking for.
The best bet would be a RR employee pulling up the railroad's acquaintance diagrams. These show all of the various yard tracks labeled and numbered. It's what we had on the UP and I suspect others would have something similar.
Thanks for the response macjet. I'm not sure I need anything that detailed. I'm just looking for various freight yard designs. I know that can vary a lot. I'm looking to build a small yard that focuses on the activity in and out of a small yard. Since almost everything will be happening in that yard, I'd like it to have a little more character than just 4 or 5 parrallel tracks with switch ladders on both ends.
They're actually very simple and usually hand drawn lines representing the yard. A good example off the top of my head would be Ney Yard in Fort Worth. Built on a hill of course, it had a two track main (not to be confused with double track main) on the east, four or five arrival/depart tracks, and a dozen if so class tracks with various tracks designated for dead line, transfer, engine pocket, etc. I don't know if I still have any copies but I can look.
The worst thing about model yards is that you can't operate them like the prototype. Nobody flat switches. But you can't set a hand brake on a model and kick cars into a track. We ran remote crews at Ney and could class a 40 cut in no time at all. It actually took us longer to walk the cut, bleed the air, and untie the brakes. Unless we were approaching OT, then things changed
I've got the diagrams to the old Rock Island Peach yard and New Yard (UP extension to Peach) here in Fort Worth if you're interested. Both are small and would be suitable for modeling IMHO. Given time I can get any of the UP yards.
The are so many good prototype yards out there to take inspiration from. Check out Welcome, MN. It was an ICE yard with a nice sized grain elevator. I should ask what you are looking for, urban, grainier, industrial? That has a lot to do with how particular yard is set up.
For groovy small yards, it's hard to beat Percival's Island in VA: It's just a question of do 4-5 through tracks serve the layout you are building. Otherwise, a good place to start for your yard is Craig Bisgeier's article on Yard Design. Or Andy Sperandeo's book A Model Railroader's Guide to Freight Yards (Kalmbach, 2004). Yards come in many shapes and sizes, so the guiding principle should be what's useful to service the operations on your layout. Hope this helps.
Okay - what you are looking for apparently is a tiny yard (forget medium sized - even tiny is way bigger than what you can fit on a typical model railroad with any kind of meaningful selective compression) with character. What era and region are we talking about? What kind of yard are you looking for? What purpose will the yard have to serve? How big is your layout? Smile, Stein
you can always google/bing shortlines and take a look at their their map options to get an over head view of various yards. Some starting points but can always visit GWI and RailAmerica's webpages to find more roads: CSX interchange with FCRD in Yulee, FL AN in Port St Joe, FL Bay Line in Panama Beach, FL RJ Corman and CSX at Guthrie, KY KWT and CSX at Bruceton, TN AZER and UP at Bowie, AZ or of course, the big roads in which ever area you like (region you want to model) My favorite is this small yard in Clifton,AZ where they blasted the side of a Mt and made a railyard. This is a view facing north, the lead comes in from the south along with the main spur leading off to the south to serve a copper mine.
Small yards may indeed be more accurate. For an era, I'll be using modern equipment but no cars over 60 feet and smaller Geep units for power. This will be a small layout. As far as designing to the yard to match the layout, the yard IS the layout. The main departing the yard (in both directions) will run into staging. The concept of the layout is to operate the yard, reclassifying cars that come in on incoming trains. Once reclassified, the cars will leave on other trains (which will be heading back to staging). I've been looking at some MR track plans, but I need to spend some more time sifting through them. I just thought I would ask here in case someone had something they thought was small but had character.
Here's a link to a couple of maps that were made by me of the Los Angeles Jct Ry in Vernon CA: http://tinyurl.com/79wl57g Click on each image to see larger versions. The LAJ is a very compact industrial switching RR. It started in 1922 & is still operating. So the A (15 tracks) & B (7 tracks) yards are relatively small. There are several "Leads" emanating out of the yards. To find the LAJ on Bing &/or Google use "4433 Exchange Av 90058" for an address. There's also a LAJ group in the TrainBoard Groups w/ more LAJ pix & links to info. All are welcome to join even if you're not LAJ modelers. There's plenty of info to give you ideas for your MR empire.
Macjet, can you get diagrams that show the interchange between UP & BNSF near tower 55 through BNSF's downtown yard? I'm modeling BNSF Wichita Falls sub focusing on Saginaw North Yard but representing a truncated Downtown Yard at one end. Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2
Thank you for the link. Unfortunately, the pictures aren't detailed enough to show the individual tracks in the yard.
Use the address given to see them in Bing/Google. Also check the LAJ Switching Maps (21&1) in the LAJ TrainBoard Group.
