yards

[tomikawaTT]

Here's a yard question for y'all...how about towers? I notice an lot of towers in modern yards in disuse. 

Thanks to the wonders of modern electronics (remote control of EVERYTHING, plus e-readable car ID) a hump yard in central Nebraska could be operated from the yard office (windowless back room,) an office building in downtown Des Moines or a yurt in Outer Mongolia.  Any of the above would entail less maintenance cost than a masonry structure at the top of the hump.

OTOH, the car inspectors' pits alongside the hump are still alive and well.  There are some things that the Mark I mod 0 human eyeball can spot that automatic devices won't.

Quick comparison - look at a transition era hump yard, and the same yard today.  The number of relay cases and equipment housings is much greater now than then.

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)

[shawnee]

Here's a yard question for y'all...how about towers? I notice an lot of towers in modern yards in disuse. 

[Dave-the-Train]

Yes and no.

Structures are era specific... so you won't get container based offices efore containers became common etc.  On the other hand sound buildings that remain useful tend to be kept and (where appropriate) the tracks will keep going round them even when the layout changes.

The type, traffic and use of a yard will also come into the equation.  Clarifying your question would get you more and more useful answers.  In steam days a coal line yard would look different from cattle pens in Chicago and they would both look different from tracks serving an elevator (which one would not necessairly think of as a yard).  Modern era an auto loading/unloading ramp would look different from a tankcar facility.

Search the web for pics for your era and what traffic you want.

[dehusman]

Yes for big yards.  Steam era yards tended to to have shorter tracks, more sub-yards, more leads, more complicated trackwork.

Big modern yards tend to be a hump or mini-hump.

Dave H.

[ndbprr]

There are differences but not the type you are looking for like fewer of them and longer cars.  About the ony difference I can think of is in the engine facilities and the outlawing of poling.

[UP2CSX]

Depends on the type of yard. There are hump yards now that are almost automatic. They were just an enginner's dream in WWII. If you mean regular classification yards, there really isn't much difference. The railroad still need to break up and make up trains. Yards, on average, have grown bigger through the years as division points moved further apart. There's more automation of turnouts compared to almost all switches being thrown by hand in the war years. But basically, there's not much difference, either in layout or function.    

[loathar]

[railroaderSTL]

are the yards the same way as the steam era or did the yards look diffrent than today's yard