rail dock unloading door spacing

[nscsx]

I know this has been asked many times. How far apart can rail served unloading doors on a warehouse be? I have this Pikestuff kit that I am kit bashing to fit a specific area and if  I position the doors, on my mock up of the structure, so as to line up with the doors on two coupled 50 ft. box cars I can get two doors in the structure with that spacing.  To get 3 bay doors I'd have to add length to the structure which I can't do. But with just the two doors at approx. 52 ft apart there is still a good bit of length left on each end of the building. So I was wanting to space them further apart to make the building look more balanced. I model in HO scale in the 80's - 90's. 

[SD70Dude]

There is no limit.  If the cars can't be spotted while coupled together the crew justs spots and ties down each individual car wherever it needs to go.  This could also happen if you ended up with 50' cars being spotted at a warehouse that was built with 60' cars in mind.  

The same thing can happen with tank cars at loading racks.  

[nscsx]

Thanks SD70Dude. 

[ndbprr]

There are two major factors. How old the building is and whether dedicated cars are used.  Old buildings will be based on 40' cars. A newer building with dedicated cars like 86' auto parts cars will have doors appropriate to the car doors. Then there is everything on between.

[wjstix]

Sometimes in the real world the spacing of doors like that could be a problem. Part of the reason why meat reefers tended to be shorter than standard cars well into the mid-twentieth century was because many Midwestern meat packing plants were built with doors to accomodate the then-standard 36' freight cars. New cars had to be built to fit that size...kinda like 24' ore cars being built to fit on the ore docks built to handle 19th century wood ore cars.

BTW how many or how far apart the doors are is only really important if the freight cars are going to be loaded directly to the door. If you put a loading dock platform between the tracks and the building, you can have as many or as few doors as you think look right.

[nscsx]

Thank for the loading dock platform idea Stix 

[nscsx]

My imagination tells me this building was probably erected in 1975. Just a warehouse dealer for furniture products. 

[doctorwayne]

wjstix

BTW how many or how far apart the doors are is only really important if the freight cars are going to be loaded directly to the door. If you put a loading dock platform between the tracks and the building, you can have as many or as few doors as you think look right.

You're right...a loading dock really opens-up spotting options for your freight cars.  Here's one I did using both long walls of the kit on the visible side of the structure.  Before gluing it together, I shortened both of those walls slightly so that the window spacing was uniform throughout, which also required some alterations of the mortar lines.

Here's the construction of the loading dock...

...and prepping the "planks" (styrene, like all the rest of the structure)

There are two freight doors opening onto the dock, both including run-through freight elevators (plus several man-doors).

The loading dock can accommodate 3 40' boxcars or 4 36'-ers.

A long-time very good friend donated the structure kit, so I named it for him.

Wayne

[nscsx]

Structure looks great Wayne. My structure will be far smaller. What's the narrowest dock  I can can get away with?

[chutton01]

nscsx

Structure looks great Wayne. My structure will be far smaller. What's the narrowest dock  I can can get away with?

Since you mentioned you envision the warehouse (which would be handling large cartons/pallets if it is a furniture warehouse) was build 1975+, it will need enough room for forklift operations. Assuming you have a model forklift (or two) chosen for this scene, then at a minimum the dock width to be realistic..ish should be the length of the forklift +the length of the load you plan to pose it with + a bit. Forklifts can have very tight turning radius, but still should be a bit of slack room (assuming the doors of the warehouse don't quite match directly with the doors of the cars to be loaded, which you implied).  This page discussing warehouse aisle sizing for forklife operations may or may not be useful to you (look for the heading 'HOW TO CALCULATE FORKLIFT AISLE WIDTH' on it).  Again, with the warehouse being post 1975 40ft boxcars were pretty rare in general service by that time, (except for special loads like grain, newsprint, waste, etc) so the warehouse doors would be sized based on 52/54 ft centers (or longer- 62ft+).  If you go with a dock, by the 1970s it would very much be poured concrete or the like (asphalt maybe within a retaing wall? Nah, IMO Concrete would be more much likely).  What I did do was search around using Google Aerial the Raritan Center and nearby Heller industrial parks in Raritan, NJ (served by the Raritan Central, a very good shortline which unlike class I's looks for business), my go to for modern 21st century rail-served industrial parks, and it looks like any business that gets Box Car traffic (like the relatively new Home Depot DC) doesn't use a dock - direct loading via wall doors. Zip along Google aerial and see for yourself.

[nscsx]

Thanks Chutton01 for your searching around on Google. If spacing at 62ft centers could be plausible for 50ft box cars I would forgoe the dock and just use doors.

[doctorwayne]

That might be a better choice.  I'm modelling the late '30s, when there were still lots of 36' boxcars in-service, along with 40'-ers, and an increasing amount of 50'-ers, too.
I have some industries which don't necessarily provide for a cut of equal-length cars, but rather one with enough space between doors to allow a variety of car-lengths to be accommodated at the same time.

That would likely have been a nuisance for the guy making the cuts for each spot, and setting the brakes or blocking wheels.

Wayne

[HO-Velo]

Didn't have room for a dock, so used two Walthers Cornerstone HO Bud's Trucking kits for my warehouse.  The two doors on the left of the structure have 68' between centers and can accommodate two 57' reefers, not coupled.  Don't have any 60', but appears two of them would work too. 

Regards, Peter

  

[chutton01]

nscsx

Thanks Chutton01 for your searching around on Google. If spacing at 62ft centers could be plausible for 50ft box cars I would forgoe the dock and just use doors.

Hmm. I took a common HO boxcar (I think it was the Details West 52ft double plug door boxcar with cushion underframe (this boxcar model i think has been issued by other manufacturer) which I am patching and weather (it has a 1975 build date, so it needs to be pretty rough in my late 2010s modules' timeframe). Measured coupler to coupler it is 57 scale feet. With something like the old school Athearn PCF R20 reefer (early 1970s) I'm getting about 62 scale feet.  This just means get measurements of the rolling stock you'd like to spot at your industries (this includes covered hoppers and tank cars which often require special piping or pnuematic ducting for unloading at a fixed facility - flat cars and coil cars not so much.  Everything else, likely Jeff Wilson wrote a book covering it already).
Looking again at Raritan Center, I notice about 4 facilities which recieve boxcars (others received covered hoppers or tank cars) and these facilities had their boxcar dock doors which are expanded in width to handle double doors (which are the norm for modern boxcars). I think you can use this to your advantage , as the door frames seem to be visible even over a Plate F boxcar (let alone a Plate C). Make custom dock doors scaled for double door width, and if you have a length mismatch just fiddle around with the cars' position till everything looks OK and make a note of which combos look right (just don't dump 'em on the ground...)

[nscsx]

HO-Velo

Didn't have room for a dock, so used two Walthers Cornerstone HO Bud's Trucking kits for my warehouse.  The two doors on the left of the structure have 68' between centers and can accommodate two 57' reefers, not coupled.  Don't have any 60', but appears two of them would work too. 

Regards, Peter

  

 

I always wanted to use a similar Walthers Kit stucture to the one you have (walthers modern steel warehouse) but I dont have the room on my small shelf layout. I have a useable area of about 7" by 16.5" and this kit is way bigger than that. You can build it smaller but my unique dimensions would require some customizing by cutting sections down. Little bit more than I wanted to get into at the moment. What color green did you use on that building?

[nscsx]

Thanks for the idea about the wider dock doors Chutton01. That dump 'em link was funny.

[riogrande5761]

As the Italians would say, fugedubutit!  Don't worry!

[HO-Velo]

nscsx

color green did you use on that building

Gosh, time is just flying, been a decade since building the warehouse, if memory serves, (and that's getting iffy nowadays), I think it was Floquil MKT Green.

Good luck on your build.  Regards, Peter

[rrebell]

Spacing would be based on age of building.

[mobilman44]

At the 5 refineries I worked at, all of the warehouses attending box car tracks had their oversize doors spaced to fit strings of 50 ft rail cars.  The older refineries originally had them spaced for 40 ft cars, but that was changed to 50 ft car spacing in the late 50s / early 60s.

Note, as I recall, the biggest (most doors) of the 5 locations had 5 or 6 doors.  The rest were set up with 3 or 4 spaced openings.