One of the key industries for my layout was the ATSF stockyard/feed lot located at Morris.  It was designed to service at least 18 each 40 foot stock cars at a time and their associated livestock.  The purpose of the stock feed lot was to rest/water/feed the livestock while also cleaning & servicing the stock car trains traveling from the west and traveling to Chicago. The original track alignment is shown below.

I went back to the drawing board and laid out exactly what I would need to have for servicing the 18 each 40 foot stock cars. The picture below shows part of the hand drawn plan.

In order to fit the revised plan, the siding track would have to be moved alongside the mainline in order to maximize the area for the off loading ramps and stock pens since there really was not enough room in between the original track alignment. The overall stockyard/feed lot will be approximately 5-1/2 feet long to accommodate the 18 stock cars. The second picture shows the revised track plan and alignment of the stockyard siding.

This is the Part 1 video from my YouTube channel that shows the overall area for the project.

Now the question was … how to either buy or build the stockyard from with ready made kits or from a mountain of styrene pieces. While doing some research on what ready-made stockyard kits were available in N-scale, I discovered that there was really only one.  It is a nicely done laser cut wood kit by the N-Scale Architect (NSA) that I bought a few years ago. However the gates ended up being only 2 inches apart and they actually needed to be 3-1/2 inches apart to service two 40 foot stock cars.  So I started looking at kit bashing several of their kits.  Cost analysis of what was needed would be about 6 more kits at anywhere from $36 to $40 each so the cost was rapidly approaching mid $200 which did not include any breakage (since I had already broken pieces off the one that I had).  The NSA kit is great for a small stockyard operation but would not work for me in this case. The next possibility was to build from styrene strips. I started looking at what it would take to scratch build and decided that was a non-starter as the pieces for the fencing would be very hard to keep aligned since they were so small.  What about just buying ramps & fence?  There are ramps for N-scale (laser cut wood) that run anywhere from $11 to $15 each so 18 of them would be around $200.  Cattle fencing (about 38 inches per package) can be had for around $15 each so that was another bundle of $$. So what was next??  How about a 3D printer!!!  
My oldest son received a 3D printer exactly like the one shown below for Christmas.  He uses it to build parts for his 1/144 scale RC controlled fighting warships.  After speaking to him at length about how he liked it and seeing some of the pictures of things that he had built, I decided to get one.

After receiving the 3D printer (daVinci Mini) that was purchased for less than $300, I got to work designing (easy to use free design software is available for the printer from the manufacturer) the parts needed for the stockyard.  It isn’t Shapeways quality stuff but it is certainly good enough for this N-scale project.  I have now printed all of the parts needed for the project and it has cost about $10 worth of the PLA material that the printer uses.  Some of the items that have been printed are shown below.

During assembly (to be discussed in the next blog), I broke two pieces so I just re-printed them.  I also discover that one item (the crossbar on the front of the cattle ramp was too low in scale so it was cut off and a replacement part was designed and printed.  These will be shown in the next blog.
Until the next time.

My YouTube Channel is -  https://www.youtube.com/user/tanzj