i need ideas!,,,, let my see yours, pics and or track plans..
how long should i have a yard in N scale?
how long should i have a yard in N scale?
let me see your rail yards!
- Thread starter ozzy
- Start date
Hi ozzy - I dont have any rail yards as of yet. Im guessing that the railyards should be less than about 1/4 of the loop of track you are planning on running the trains. Just my ideas.
Happy Holidays !!!
Happy Holidays !!!
L
lester perry
Ozzy, My track plan is in planing for the future, called the Nomad Valley. It's a small branchline operation, so it's not very big. Mason Jar helped with it.
Loren
Loren
grewsome said:
A small branch line would not have a large classification yard. The "yards" you would find on a branch line would be appropriate to the industries modeled. A lumber yard receiving lumber from the railroad in carload quantities would probably have 1 at most 2 tracks. A gypsum mine/cement manufacturing plant might have as many as a half dozen tracks depending on it's size. On the other hand a cement and aggregate distributor who receives his product from the cement manufacturing company would probably not have more than a couple of tracks. When I worked at Kaiser Steel's Eagle Mountain Iron Mine in the early '70's they used to ship a 100 car ore train three times a week, if my memory is correct. They didn't have a yard, though. If my memory is correct, they had a balloon track around the pelletising plant where the cars were loaded. They had a couple of small sidings leading into the locomotive shop where they did maintainance on the locomotives and cabooses. The ore cars were maintained by the S.P. at a rip track in Indio or for more extensive repairs, taken to Colton.
The point of this rambling is that the size of the industries will determine how much trackage each has. The amount of space you have available will determine how big your industries can be, and that will determine how big any yards should be. If your space is limited, your branch line could service a bunch of small customers that only have 1 or 2 sidings to receive or ship loads out. Once you have your industries located, identified, and sized, you will know how many cars your branch would handle. Then build some sort of staging to supply the needed cars. If you don't have space for a staging yard under the layout or connected to the layout, you could put it on a shelf allong the wall away from the layout. Then use a train length track on a cart that could be rolled up to the layout to bring a train out of staging to the layout or send one to staging from the layout.