I was looking at Phil Goldstein's site for the Pennsylvania Railroad's West 37th Street Freight Station on Manhattan Island.
http://members.trainweb.com/bedt/indloco/prr37.html
To unload a carfloat it looks like you have to pull a cut of cars eastward into the center area runaround and then move the locomotive to the west end of the cut. Then it gets interesting, there is less than 120 feet from the switch to the northern freight houses and the float bridge. You might get an engine and two cars west of the switch. Looks like three options:
1) pull two cars at a time from the main yard and stack them up before making a final shove the freight house, or
2) pull four cars at a time and back to the west end of the float bridge, or
3) pull ten cars and back the locomotive onto the now vacant carfloat track.
Painfull no matter how you do it. The aerial photos are jammed with cars, so the crews must have had their hands full.
Ray
Well, the few images of actual switching included in the entry show short locos and 2 car rakes, so seems like they had no choice but to treat the float leads as the tail track of a switchback, at least for some of the terminal tracks. The cars had to be pushed when there was no run-around at the end of the yard tracks (which most tracks at that yard didn't have). Since this was a freight terminal and not a division switching yard, I'd guess there was a constant but not overwhelming arrival and departure rate - it isn't like the car-floats were bringing in 150 car trains, more like 15 cars at a time (assuming 3 track car floats). The fact that the locos used over the decades were fairly short probably helped.I still find the concept of station floats interesting, even though those operations were pretty much gone by the time I was a kid. Sadly, NYCH's attempt to revive the station float concept for the 21st century did not end well.
Car ferrys and floats were unloaded or loaded at no more than two cars at a time or the ferry or float would turn turtle with too much weight on one side of the car.
One car would be put on the left track, then two on the right track, then two on the left track, then two on the right until the last final car was loaded, unloading went the same way.
Rick J
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Rick, I doubt that most car floats were unloaded two at a time, at least in NY harbor. I believe that the usual practice was 1) to pull the float's starboard (the one that also had the frog to the center track) side halfway off the carfloat, 2) pull the port track, 3) pull the rest of the starboard track clear of the float bridge switch and use the starboard string as a handle to pull the center track.
Phil's website has a more complete discussion and some links to a Youtube video of a modern New York New Jersey Rail operation.
http://members.trainweb.com/bedt/indloco/developmenttransferbridge.html
Can't comment on how it was done elsewhere.
I'm going to agree that they probably switched the 3-track car floats in the fashion described in Phil's Industrial & Offline Terminal Railroads (and as you recapped) since the 1920s - there was some volume, so 2 cars at a time wouldn't work too well.Actually, looking at that 1909 Bromley map of the PRR terminal, they couldn't switch at all - no run around track shown (and yes, that diagram does show run-arounds for the West Shore terminal one block south). Since they had those Tank Engines for switching, those diagrams must be inaccurate.In the 1950 valuation map you got your run-arounds, so the switch crew pulls the cuts off the float into the storage tracks, runs around, and starts switching that terminal a few cars at a time. Hey, those crews knew how to switch, it was their job, and probably better than sweeping up offal at the meat-packing plants.I found the Industrial and Offline Terminal Railroad site interesting from when I first encountered maybe three years ago. Before then the only real info I had about the once extensive NY Harbor float operations was dribs and drabs here on the web, and before that the 1980s book "Brooklyn's Waterfront Railways", which was neat, but not remotely comprehensive (and IIRC had no really good maps or track diagrams). By the time I was in college and exploring the city regularly, it was the mid-1980s and practically all the waterfront RR operations were gone, some sites redeveloped, but much just abandoned. Phil's site did answer a question I often had - what on earth was located on the site where the Javit's Convention Center was eventually built - and it in fact was the PRR terminal (along with the NYC yard to the south) which is the topic of this thread.