SIT yards

Storage yards for both empties and loaded cars are fairly common in Texas, since that is a hub for the chemical industries.

Here is a SIT (storage in transit) yard at Spring, TX, north of Houston.  Plastic pellets are made on the Gulf coast loaded in railcars and shipped to Spring where they are stored in storage yards around the perimeter of switching yard.  During the day the plastic companies bill out the cars as customers order plastic and then at night the switch engine digs out the releases from the yard.  Cherry picking on a grand scale.  the pulls are then switched by direction and added to through freight trains to send them where ever they need to go in N America.  There are between 750 and 1000 cars stored here, all grey covered hoppers of plastic.

$$$$

A lot of money spent just to have a layout to park cars.

What about the costs?

I may be missing something, but SIT seems to me like a uneconomical proposition. A railcar only makes money upon delivery, so every owner should (theoretically) want all its cars en route to a customer instead of sitting still on a yard. It also seems like storage on railcars is more expensive than storage on the factory, since railcars are more expensive to purchase (lease?) and maintain (along with the said yard) than a silo or bin at the factory.

What I am missing?

Regards 

Car storage

Also gives a reason to have cars on a layout with no industries suitable for them. Car storage could be any type of car that is not needed somewhere else at the time.It doesn't need to be a huge yard, it can just be a long single track spur. The branch line north of Santa Cruz has stored tank cars and the old CCT mainline south of Sac had a long string of stored cars last time I was out there....DaveB

google for SIT -nifty idea

Interesting idea. Anyone who enjoys long drags of one type would find this useful. 

I never heard of Storage In Transit but it makes sense.

Storing full or empty railcars does add cost to the product.  But, customer demand never exactly matches up with supply.  Either the product or the empty transportation has to be somewhere.  Our local Walmart rents trailers to hold Christmas stuff they can't fit on their shelves - yet.  Similarly, either a manufacturer or user may not have space to store 30 carloads of plastic pellets until they are ready to use it.

SIT must be cost effective for some companies.  In the first link to Google Maps they are creating a whole new yard.   Pioneer Railcorp has 17 separate shortlines and offers SIT services.

Wasn't storage in transit done in the coal industry too?

I seem to remember reading that coal mines would produce and particular runs (size/type) of coal and dump it in hoppers, then the hoppers would be hauled off to sit until someone needed (and bought) that run. 

Actually, as I said in my OP,

Actually, as I said in my OP, the railroad moves a lot of cars around given incoming and outgoing cars, along with the industry right there at the yard and freight car maint. and cleaning. Probably more on that railroad than some short lines that get modeled.

SIT

Plastics manufacturers make an entire years worth of a particular grade of plastic at one time because is is expensive to reconfigure the refinery to generate a specific chemistry of plastic in a small batch.  There are hundreds of grades of plastic.  They can build two or three square miles of storage bins (then have to figure out how to get the plastic from any particular bin to a railcar to be loaded) or they just put in in the railcars, handle it once and store the rail car.  It can't be that bad of an idea because they have been doing it with tens of thousands of rail cars at dozens of yards for the last 30-40 years.

The plastics companies lease the cars from private leasing firms.  They lease the track footage from the railroad or yard operator.  The railroad gets a movement billing from the refinery to the storage yard, a storage fee for the lease of the track and then the outbound movement billing from the storage yard to the customer.  There is no "demurrage" or car hire on the stored cars because they are private owner cas on leased track.

Not saying there isn't a better way to do it, but they haven't found it yet in the last several decades, and I know from personal experience people have tried to figure out other ways.  If the chemical companies can figure a way to make custom chemistries of the plastic in small batches (several hundred tons) without contamination and cost effectively, that might make it go away.  Until then the SIT option has proven to be the best.

Actually, as I said in my OP,

Even with a SIT yard not directly connected to a chemical complex there can be a lot of switching.  A large yard like that might get 50-60 cars in and 50-60 cars out every day.  There are probably 5 clusters of 10-12 tracks , so at least one car comes out of 2/3 the tracks on any given day.

I usually take exception with people describing "random" things on railroads and switching yards by cherry picking, but this is one bona fide case where (from the railroad's point of view) the billing of cars is about as close to random as possible and pretty much all the switching is cherry picking.

Plus once the cars get switched out, they have to be blocked, so the yard will build 4 blocks for cars going in different directions:  North (Ft Worth), Northeast (Little Rock), Southeast (Houston Settegast yard), West (Houston Englewood yard).

Modeling one of those SIT yards would save you money on paint, you only need one car color (grey) and it would save you time since you wouldn't have to waste  effort getting pictures of the cars (they are all grey covered hoppers).

Compare Google Map to Bing Map

If you want to see the site before the SIT yard was built, copy the latitude/longitude over to Bing and press enter.

Seems BING's satellite view is a bit older.

CEMR

The CEMR ( http://www.cemrr.com)is a shortline in Manitoba that has made a business out of storing railcars on old trackage as well as some very clever transload and processing facilities. Beyond that they perform locomotive and freight car maintenance, and serve a few small industries along their right of way.

Example from Germany

Here is a yard that was formerly used for classification of freight cars in a port area but is now a storage facility to store unused passenger equipment and locomotives: https://goo.gl/maps/KdQAWESaBBv

The interesting point of using it as a layout theme is that you can show a funny mix of rolling stock from different areas and sometimes even eras.

Joern

I found something you may just like here in town.

32°21'56.89" N  93°38'38.24" W  Port of Shreveport Bossier.

Look for the white water tower in the middle of the wye.  Follow it East.  If you have keen eyes you will notice it swings North to a large SIT.  Keep following the tracks.  You will notice this whole thing is a large rectangle loop.  So, screw the tropes!  You might have some fun with this.

If you follow HWY 1 South you will find where the railroad cuts across the road again.  That field now has multiple storage tracks that are overgrown with weeds. There are railcars stored out there.

Also, if you do a street view of the factories out there you are going to see some wild colors.

Den

Great ideas

These yard sites are a great idea for the modeler who is more interested in trains, less interested in buildings and scenery. I've been contemplating a module project to accommodate my surplus HO equipment. If built as a yard module it would have potential to use with different layout configurations. Or it might be built alone as a minimum-size display layout.

So there is a real-life railroad oval, referenced in the original post. It's about 60 miles east of San Antonio Texas. If you want to model it in true HO scale it fits a 36' x 50' foot space, and that's just for the oval-wye-shops in the lower right quadrant of the photo. The width of the photo is about 1.5 miles (north is to the left).

Car Storage In Northwest Washington

The Mount Vernon (Washington State) Terminal Railway's main "customer" is storage of tank cars.  Last year I met the owner/operator of the railroad and he told me that at "maximum capacity" they can store about 60 (tank) cars, although it seems to me that if they were filled to that capacity their single SW-1200 (former Tacoma Belt Line loco) wouldn't be able to get out of their single stall "roundhouse" (engine house).  They have a couple of other customers at the north end of their line, which is about a mile long, including a fertilizer off-loading spot (a single covered hopper's load is transferred to semi trailer-trucks for transfer elsehwere) and some sort of glycerine processing plant. 

So if you have a fascination for tank cars, and limited space, this would be a great railroad to model.

Al Carter

All that trackage is fairly new

That entire complex was built within the last 10 years or so, mostly driven by the fracking boom in South Texas.

While on a railfan day with a friend back around 2001, we stumbled across that little shortline (Texas, Gonzales & Northern).  Back then it was an entirely unremarkable little shortline with light rail, only 1 (maybe 2) switchers, and a handful of Ag-related industries in Gonzales. There was a single siding up at Harwood used for crude oil transloading into tank cars (an interesting modeling topic in itself).

Now I see it's quite the going concern with lots of storage, transloading, loading, and unloading.  Lots of opportunity for a small shortline modeler to showcase a large collection of rolling stock.

Craig

  "Lots of opportunity for a

and if someone want a large collection of rolling stock/small area  in an old era they should check out the New York harbor car float terminals, many of them look like compressed model train layouts...DaveB

CNJ Bronx Terminal

You have seen Tim Warris' (aka Mr. Fast Tracks) Bronx Terminal layout, haven't you?

From the free edition of TrainMasters TV:  http://trainmasters.tv/video-player/tmtv-2013-11-act-1

"You have seen Tim Warris'

    Hi Jeff, Yes  I've followed his construction blog. There were almost two dozen small terminals in New York that would make great prototypes for a realistic small layout. Most lasted into the 60's but at least one is still shuttling modern equipment across the bay. Check out youtube videos for New York New Jersey rail or New York Cross harbor railroad if interested........DaveB 

There have been several

There have been several comments about older aerial photography. Be sure to check out http://historicaerials.com. You have to be lucky to have photos of your area of interest because the coverage is not continuous across the US. Many photos go back to the 1950s.

Another Large Storage Yard In Dry North Texas

Go to     https://www.google.com/maps/@36.0041957,-101.8929257,1713m/data=!3m1!1e3 

Moore County, TX  -  it's west southwest of Sunray, TX

18 months ago there were 8,000+ mostly new cars stored there, and there appear to be more there today.

Some of the tank cars were manufactured the month before we visited.

Some of the rails on the spurs were spiked directly to the rails,  without tie plates.