Hi Skoti, Look at the small

Hi Skoti,

Look at the small yard plan by Byron Henderson about half way down on this thread:

https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/design-a-ho-engineservice-yard-or-fuel-tank-dump-yard-12186329

That would seem to meet your requirements.

John (in Canada)

Design

You have pretty well described what your design should be.  Separate arrival departure tracks for a small yard is a model railroad thought but since most of us have to compromise what they become is really just a couple long tracks.

We don't know your footprint but I would put the one long track next to the main and extend that track to form a switching lead.  At the throat I would put a pair of crossovers.  I would break the yard lead off that track between the crossovers so you could depart out of any yard track to the main.  The other crossover lets you suck a cut off the main back onto the switch lead.  The yard lead would have the other long track and the class tracks breaking off the lead.  The engine service track would either be just a pair of tracks off the main on the other dis of the yard or on a switch back parallel to the lead.  Since its a small facility in the modern era, I wouldn't put an engine house, fuel racks or sand tower.  Everything would be serviced by truck.

thank you both!

very much for the input, i think i will use the far left version of Byron Henderson's yard designs and just add two sidings for locomotive servicing.

Never enough room

When designing my first yard, I laid 9 ladder tracks into a 16' x 4' area complete with engine facility and service center and thought I'd be golden.  Well, I didn't factor in a long enough yard lead, which chewed up more space, and I lost so much room with my ladder leads that my actual capacity turned out about 30 cars under what I originally estimated.  On my new layout, I am following Dave's advice and skipping out on the fueling/sanding/engine facilities for my shortline.  Truck service is common on the prototype and, from a cost perspective, is probably significantly less than the cost to maintain such onsite facilities.  This will, in the long run, save you considerable space for additional yard trackage or even an industry or two.

-Johnny

PS: Crossovers are your BEST FRIEND!  You can never have enough, it seems. Also, never underestimate the length of your yard lead.  Take your longest expected train and add 50% (or at least 25%) to its length - that should be the overall length of your planned lead.

You have read this right?

I know it's such a popular article that most have read it, but I just wanted to be sure that you have seen it.  Words to live by   http://www.housatonicrr.com/yard_des.html

Steve

Seems to Work

Take a look at Brittain Yard on my track plan. It appears unconventional at first glance however in simulations it works great. XTrkCAD allows you to operate trains on a track plan. I have many hours receiving, sorting, assembling, departing trains from Brittain Yard as designed. The arrangement passed inspection by Byron Henderson and it closely mimics the prototype it represents.

http://www.lkorailroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/upper1.jpg

Funny, I'm modeling a

Funny, I'm modeling a Firestone plant that's here in CT, although I can't pinpoint exactly what's going in/out of the place.  I think I'll take a trip today...

A couple thoughts

Think about your number of operators and your traffic patterns while finalizing the design. If you run little main line traffic, or only run the railroad with one or two operators, a separate, dedicated yard lead could be unnecessary -- just work stuff on the little-used main line. 

Also, although the 'yard lead as long as your longest train' is a model railroading mantra, the 1:1 railroads rarely worked train length cuts in the yards -- it's very common to pull two or three tracks to build a train onto a departure track. Yes, a long lead is nice to have, but it isn't always strictly necessary.

What you definitely need are enough classification tracks to easily sort out incoming cuts, but this could be as few as three or four tracks, depending on your traffic patterns.

Do you know how a yard operates?

D minus

It's funny, but I looked over that Housatonic page and Sudbury Yard on the Sudbury Division fails almost every "rule" on the list.  The trouble is that our model closely duplicates its prototype and works very well.  I guess rules are made to be broken...

Care to elaborate?

Jurgen:

Care to elaborate? What rules? And why do you think breaking that rule is not a problem?

Could provide some useful insight ...

One thing I noticed in photos of this yard (if I have the right yard) is it's mostly empty. Almost any yard design will work if it's empty much of the time - but as I said, a yard takes a lot of layout space - and running with a yard that's so large it's empty much of the time is not a very good use of precious layout space.

Starting Point

Great qualifying question!

I didn't have first hand knowledge when I began but after running countless scenarios on XTrkCAD I soon began to understand. I don't know if it is prototypical operation but I have managed to achieve some semblance of orderly process handling cars in my virtual yard. I get'em in and I get'em out on the correct trains in orderly blocks. Gotta be doing something right! Although, I have jammed up the yard on many, many occasions. The exercises sure make it painfully obvious the importance of lead, caboose, and I/O track positions/capacities/access. To the OP - don't skimp on time spent designing your yard and analyzing its relationship to the rest of the layout.

Shucks, I am having a blast just running virtual trains. Running the real layout will be euphoric.

It's funny, but I looked over

It IS funny Jurgen, but I have to agree with you. Thru my own personal experience with railfanning some of the old Southern and now NS yards here in Alabama, I haven't seen any yard that follows those rules at all. Instead of the ten commandments of yard design, maybe they should be ten suggestions?

Cjcrecent wrote: It IS

 1) Craig Bisgeier's "commandments" are suggestions, not rules.

 2) What's more - they are suggestions for how to organizing flat switching yards on freight oriented model railroads with multiple operators, where the mainline is short relative to yard size, and the arrival/departure frequency is higher than on many prototypical yards.

 One thing that is obvious when you compare a model railroad and a real railroad is that everything on a model railroad is very compressed compared with a real railroad.

 And that we typically use selective compression - we scale the mainline between yards a lot more than we scale the yards. A run of 50 miles may get 10 feet of length on the layout, while a one mile long yard also get 10 feet of length. Run time is a lot shorter than on the real railroad, while switching time is not quite that compressed.

3) So suggestions like e.g. "have a separate yard switching lead, so classification can continue while trains arrive and depart" make sense, on a model railroad classification yard so small that it barely would have qualified as an small auxiliary industry yard on a real railroad.

4) If you have a lot of space for a yard, and will not be running many trains, then you can ignore several of Craigs suggestions.

 Yards should be designed so they support the activity you need it to support. If you will be the single operator of a railroad, you don't need a switching lead. If you are not using cabooses, you obviously do not need a caboose track.

 If you have enough room (and yard capacity) for more long double ended tracks, then they are more flexible than a single double ended A/D track and four-five single ended tracks, since trains can go directly into any double ended track.

 The core question is "what do you need your yard to be able to do?".

 How many cars will the yard need to be able to hold at the most? 

 Will you have trains that stop at the yard, set out a block of cars and pick up a block of cars before continuing (or going back to where it came from)?

 Will trains terminate in or originate from your yard? How many blocks of cars would you need to be building at any given time? How long may those those blocks get?

 Will you need an engine terminal? What kind of locomotives service do you want to include? Fueling? Water and sand? An engine house or roundhouse of some kind? A RIP (Repair in Place) track ? Service tracks for delivering fuel and sand, or hauling away ashes?

 And so on and so forth. To design a sensible yard for your layout, you need to figure out what you want to be able to do in that yard.

 Smile,
 Stein

Rules vs. Reality

Sure, Joe; I'll try to compare Sudbury vs. the "rules."  Bear in mind this is our model of Sudbury we are talking about, but it's about a 95% recreation of its prototype, so the real Sudbury works almost the same, other than they being able to kick cars while we have to do all flat switching.

As for our yard being mostly empty, that can be true at times, but the number of cars varies widely over the course of a session.  Here's a video we showed sometime back which shows an actual operating session, and you can judge for yourself on that score:

Just so you can see where this is coming from, here's the Housatonic page:

http://www.housatonicrr.com/yard_des.html

1: Thou Shalt Not Foul The Main

Sudbury has freight sheds which are located on the opposite side of the mainlines from the yard, and working the shed takes a couple scale time hours, and blocks the westward track much of that time.  There is also a junction just west (towards the viewer in the video) of the yard where two branches leave the Cartier sub main, and all yard switching at this end of the yard fouls these main tracks as a matter of course.

2: Thou Shalt Provide A Dedicated Lead Track

At the east end of the yard there are two yard leads.  At the west end, however, there is no dedicated lead at all; the switching must use the Nickel Sub main track, which is also used by all traffic off the Webbwood sub (about 7 trains each way per session.)  Naturally, most of the switching takes place at the west end, on both the prototype and model.

3: Thou Shalt Not Foul The Yard Lead

Well, see point 2 above...

4: Thou Shalt Use Arrival / Departure Tracks

Well, admittedly Sudbury is not a division point yard, so virtually none of the through freights tie up here.  If they have traffic for Sudbury, they just stop on the main, make their set offs and pick ups, pump up the air and then leave.  There are, however, (at this point, more are planned as we build) half a dozen locals which either turn or originate in Sudbury, and there are no designated arrival or departure tracks for these trains.  The yardmaster just checks his status board when a train calls his yard limits and tells them which track to park in.  One train, 955, can be up to 40 cars long with local traffic from Toronto and will use up 2 long yard tracks when it arrives.  The yardmaster has to plan for its arrival and just leaves the cars there until he can work up a switchlist or two so the yard crews can classify the cars.

5: Thou Shalt Provide A Caboose Track

The "vans" are stored in one of the back two tracks of the yard.  The last three tracks are designated for Company Service, and Repair in Place and MOW cars accumulate there.  It's sort of a caboose track, I guess.

6: Thou Shalt Provide A Run-around

This is where Sudbury scores well; how about 20 double ended tracks?

7: Thou Shalt Be Able to Reach Everything

Sudbury is over 5 feet wide in the middle.  Because it's accessible from both sides, you can pretty much reach everyplace from the aisle, but when you are on the yard side, there are a lot of cars you can't get to on the station side tracks.  You just have to go fish them out when you need to, but since we pull the whole track when  we classify most of the time, all the activity is at the ladders, and you can get at cars there easily.  Derailments are extremely rare.

8: Thou Shalt Provide Auxiliary Yard Tracks

Again, we do have those three short tracks at the back for repairs and mow, but they are not separate from the yard.  We also have a long, 4 track local storage yard which we are still working on where things like the wreck train will be stored, but that's a ways from done yet.

9: Thou Shalt Not Overcrowd The Yard

Define "overcrowd."  We have 17 tracks for classification, but with four compass directions of traffic, half a dozen locals, a couple tracks full of local stored cars, plus the need to keep a track open for run around moves, all the tracks can get tied up at times with blocks of various lengths.  The yardmaster has to re-purpose tracks continually to keep tracks free for new arrivals as the day goes on, while still getting the locals out on time.  This is no different than its prototype; we spoke with the actual Terminal Supervisor there a couple times and he said the yard was a nightmare at times; too much traffic and not enough tracks.

10: Thou Shalt Make It Easy To Run

We use ground throws at this point, so panels are a non-issue.  The wiring is solid, and we have been installing frog juicers to take care of the last electrical issues (stalling.)  Any mechanical problems are fixed as they come up, and that's unavoidable with over 50 handlaid turnouts.  Pushing 20 cars through half a dozen turnouts happens regularly, without incident, though.

As far as keeping it organized goes, it's not a good place for rookies.  You need to be experienced to run it well, and if you aren't, there will be a lot of late traffic and things which don't get done, like switching the shed.  We have some paperwork outlining what needs to be done and when, but time flies when you're having fun (or behind the eightball.)  It's a challenging spot at the club, but several people enjoy taking it on.

I guess Sudbury didn't fail as much as I thought at first...maybe give it C minus instead?

W&N Wilmington Yard

Here is the yard throat of my Wilmington, DE yard on the W&N .  The two tracks leaving on the top are the (left to right) main and switching lead tail track.  The cabooses are sitting on the caboose track and teh engine is on the scale track.

The difference comes from modeling others models instead of. .

Sorry, but I have to say Jurgen is absolutely right here.

FWIW, in my experience,  the solution is simple and obvious.  If you want to enjoy any prototypical aspect of railroads, then study the real railroads and find out what they did and why and how. It may not be as easy and quick as reading a Model Railroad "expert's" book or article, but you will eventually find out what works in real life. Then you can model that aspect, to your degree of comfort, in confidence.

The problems mentioned always arise if instead you end up studying other peoples models of railroads, which may or may not have specific aspects which are only appropriate on their particular model, or their particular room, circumstances, models available to buy at the time, etc,.

When you realize that most MR articles are based on "improvements" compared to reading of previously written up MR article techniques, which were based on their authors "improvements" of their previously read articles, then you start to get some idea of how far removed and irrelevant from actually reality, "modeling" can get.

IMO, there are no "rules" of model railroading. Just the depth of your knowledge of your chosen subject, and the extent to which you want to push your miniaturized copy, sorry "model railroad", to be to your satisfaction, close to it.

Andy wrote: FWIW, in my

 Clearly you can copy the layout of a real yard from a real railroad, if you either pick a small yard to model, or have a lot of space (e.g. on a club sized layout) to dedicate to a yard.  Sudbury is a good example of a prototype based yard that seems to work well.

  The challenge comes with guys who want "a yard" for their layout, where neither the layout nor the yard is based on a specific prototype location.  Like Skoti - the guy (or gal) who started this thread. Often these yard also will have to be shoehorned into a small space, without there being much advance knowledge about how it will be used.

 In this case you can either give them some general suggestions (ala Craig BIsgeier's "commandments") on features which has been found to work well on many layouts, you can lean back and say "study the prototype", or you can ask about specifics for this particular design - how will the yard fit into the layout and the room, how much space does he have for a yard, what scale is he in, how many trains does he plan on running during a session and so on and so forth.

 To do selective compression in a reasonably intelligent way, and to make reasonably intelligent compressible selections of what to model, you need to keep two different things in mind at the same time:

 1) How does a real railroad operate,
 and
 2) What you have is still a model railroad - you will have to use various modeling tricks

 Among those modeling tricks is things like e.g. replacing some of the double ended tracks with single ended tracks to increase yard capacity. Changes the way the yard functions, but allows a shorter yard - which is often necessary on a model railroad - where we often run out of length quickly.

 An illustration:
 

 You can do things like using compound ladders or pinwheel ladders - also devices to increase yard capacity or shorten yard ladders.

 Most of us will have to run shorter trains than the prototype (unless we pick a prototype which ran very short trains - i.e. early railroading or industrial branches with little traffic). Most of us will have to do a lot of selective compression to make things fit the space we have available.

 It is not quite as simple as "just do what the prototype did". At the end of the day, what you have is still a model.

 Sometimes it is a simplified representation of some aspects of the way the prototype operated. Sometimes the layout itself is not really a model of something that existed or could have existed, but the locomotive and cars are models - simplified representations of real locomotives and cars.

 Having said that - I of course agree that understanding more about real railroads is not only interesting, but extremely useful when designing a model railroad.

 I just don't subscribe to the theory that we can ignore the fact that there are some rules of the thumb which applies to model railroads which are not really directly based on the prototype. Things like "what is the minimum radius sensible for a model railroad layout if I plan to run these types of cars?", "how much staging do I need to simulate this amount of traffic" and so on and so forth.

 Smile,
 Stein

There's the prototype and then there's the PROTOTYPE

As much as we might want to kid ourselves, we're not modeling the prototype uncompressed at 87:1 or whatever scale we're modeling in (except in very rare instances).

The minute you consider we have a mainline that's compressed 30:1, 60:1, or even more - that's where the rub comes in. The vastly compressed main means lots more trains need to be handled a lot closer together than the prototype.

We also generally don't have the space of the prototype to model their yards, nor can we drop switch and let cars roll into place in yard tracks or use other such yard switching shortcuts the prototype can use.

All this means we need often need to apply compromises to keep our model yard flowing as well as a prototype yard.

In the case of my Roseburg yard, I added a switching lead where the prototype didn't really have one. My reasoning is this allows my model yard to somewhat keep up with my much compressed mainline.

Craig's ten commandments of yard design can be thought of as the ten compromises you may need to consider to keep your model yard on par with a prototype yard if you're going to give your model yardmaster a fighting chance to keep up with your much compressed train traffic.

In the yard Jurgen mentions, I don't see it's that far out of line with Craig's yard design criteria. Many of the elements listed are there, they're just double-duty trackage. There's nothing that says all of these elements need to be dedicated trackage - you just need to think about accommodating them somehow. Most of those elements are present in Jurgen's yard, so I'd give it a B+.

1st thoughts

One other "suggestion" with yards is the formula of N +1.  What that means is the number of tracks you think you need (in your update 2) and add one more (3).  I would add this as the 11th commandment if I was re writing them.

Nice start on the design.  I'm not sure how you plan to run your RR, but most would find having the main line jinking through the yard cumbersome at best. I'm not telling you have to do yours like this but consider something like this.  Not exactly like this - it's just a rough idea to illustrate a possible change

Steve

Sudbury Yard

I guess that depends on what is meant by auxiliary tracks. The RIP and tracks we use for MOW and caboose storage in the main yard aren't separate, but are more or less semi-permanently assigned to holding cabooses. There's the other 4-track auxiliary yard mentioned, which we're trying to get into service, and then of course there's the engine and car shop facilities which are just as large as the main yard itself (although they're only half-built). I'm not quite sure what other auxiliary tracks could be added. There's a lot that's still under construction, but I don't think anything else can really be added to the plan.

It should also be noted that while the branchline main tracks are almost constantly blocked by switching moves, the only trains to/from the branchline(s) that don't terminate at the yard at least perform switching (set out and lift), and the double track mainline never gets blocked during normal switching operations, just while the freight shed switching is going on. (and when our Rapido Canadian arrives, the mains will be completely blocked when the passenger train gets split into two separate trains in the passenger terminal.)

The "Ten Commandments" list is a reasonably good discussion of yard design, but it's more like Ten Guidelines, to thoughtfully consider when designing your yard and operations, not just blindly followed. Depending on the yard, certain things may simply not apply. As Jurgen mentions above, the one "Commandment" that Sudbury yard breaks completely is the lack of dedicated arrival/departure tracks. But based on the operation of that yard, they are not required.

The pearl of wisdom from this thread...

End Yards

For your consideration.

The Planned Texas & Rio Grand Rail Road will Have three yards. The desire for three yards will restrict how complex and expensive each yard can be.

There will be a central yard that will also serve as the division point 

There will be two end yards with reversing loops. these will most likely be a mirror image of each other The engine facilities,  LCL track, RIP track, and the fuel delivery will be located inside the Loop,

A basic plan for the fundamentals of the end yards are as follows.

Yard Goals

A. Designed with as few turnouts as practical.

B. Yard Switcher will not be required to use the main.

C. Ability to quickly release road engines from yard area

D, Only one Yard operator required.

E. Ability for Simple caboose movement and attachment

F. Ability to build two trains at the same time for departure

G. Operation should be as simple as practical

H. 2 Duplicate yards to reduce operator training.

Hope this sparks some thought.

Regards,

John

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Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.  Billy Graham

Make a yard schema...and stick to it...

I think it comes down to simply using what you have in a consistent manner.  Identify what goes where and keep that plan in place until you see a difficiency  If it's serious enough, correct the problem.  Otherwise, it need make sense to no one further than the yard manager.  A caboose track, after all, could be one of the tracks that is otherwise used as a classification track everywhere else.  If it's a caboose track on your layout, that's what it is!