There is a cement producer in Maine, Dragon Cement, which has a plant in Thomaston near Rockland on the Maine Eastern Railway. They ship cement out on barges at Rockland Wharf which requires a rotation of cars stored on a nearby storage yard. It makes for interesting operation. Its a prototype I considered but decided I wanted something with a little bit more in the way of online customers.
Examples:
http://photos.nerail.org/showpic/?2008010520391724793.jpg
http://photos.nerail.org/showpic/?2005100316361523990.jpg
http://photos.nerail.org/showpic/?200301051742591602.jpg
http://photos.nerail.org/showpic/?2003053101135916713.jpg
Its also very visible in google earth.. but I am not sure how to provide google earth links.
I just throught this was interesting since you are modeling a cement industry in a marine environment. I am not sure it would really be relevent to what your doing. I always thought it would make a great little transplant to a freelance layout since you could model the dock and the yard and just have the cement plant be in staging. I guess they are the only cement producer in Northern New England. The cement cars are quite unique.
Chris
rfbranch wrote: Sorry for taking so long on this one, real life definitely got in the way of posting the latest iteration of my plan, but based on the input I've had so far, I think this is a pretty solid final plan.
Sorry for taking so long on this one, real life definitely got in the way of posting the latest iteration of my plan, but based on the input I've had so far, I think this is a pretty solid final plan.
Hi Rich --
Like the flow of tracks here - good merging of advice and your own design.
Little more nitpicking - reach past buildings might be an issue a couple of places. You can reach maybe 30" at max - depending on layout height and whether you have to reach across buildings etc, but try to keep most tracks at 24" from edge or less.
NE corner: might be hard to reach past big purple building to couple or uncouple cars at red and green industry. Two suggestions for your evaluation:
Left side. Maybe move enginehouse to innermost of two tracks here and move it up a little north ? Would possibly improve these things:
Also possible that you should move medusa a little south for improved reach. You can fill in the corner behind medusa (NW corner) with industrial structures, roads etc to make it look like a place that needs more rail traffic. And yes - you could have an extra storage spur or two here.
SW corner: Just a suggestion - but think about
McGraw is a small and flexible set, while Hardwood is a big bulky box, 4 stories high, 10 5/8" deep. A loading dock the inside (wall side) of this building will be hard to reach, but you don't have enough space in the corner to let the track curve around to the front of this 10 5/8" deep building.
Heritage furniture (http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3164) is also four stories deep high, but only 4 3/4" deep. If you move the building a little right (towards the interchange), you have room to do an S-curve into the loading dock. Or you can do like I have done here and cut it down to a triangular shape, so you can come straight out of the corner curve:
Either way - I would recommend opening up access to the industry where you now have Hardwood a bit.
Btw - did I mention that I really like the south end of your yard ? Great combination of straight and curved turnouts down there - I am going to copy that idea from you some day!
Smile, Stein
Hmm - you could also do something like this in the lower left hand corner :
Depends on what effect you want - letting the train disappear behind a building makes the layout look bigger.
Btw - if you pull the medusa track out from the wall, the medusa/engine house area could end up something like this:
Just a few ideas - you have to figure out what works for you and sew it together in one unified design.
Looking forward to seeing your next sketch!
Thanks to all for their advice. And my apologies for the VERY SLOW reply on this one. Unfortunately real life got in the way of progress over the past month in the form of a vdery hefty vet bill.
Nonetheless, I have returned undeterred. I even went out and bought some 1x4's on sale in anticipation of starting benchwork in the relatively near future! So I've come back with my latest tweaks, incorporating a fwe of Stein's suggested tweaks - namely relocating the warehouse thereby eliminating the need for depth by the entrance to the "docks district" in the north - that helped eliminate alot of the hard to reach areas.
It's also worth noting that I will only have walls on two sides of the layout; I'm assuming they will be along the "North" and "West" side but I can turn the layout any way I want; I have a large open basement, so I can orient things in whatever fashion is most convenient. On balance, I can always came over the backdrop to address a derailment, access for cleaining, etc.
So as I said just a few minor tweaks (moved the engine house in to reduce the depth along the west wall was another suggestion I made arrangements for) but barring anything major, I would love to start benchwork on this one.
Thanks again to everyone for their thoughts!
Hi again, Rich ---
Still think you will have trouble reaching cars to uncouple and couple if you have a big building between you and the coupling/uncoupling point. You arms are long enough that probably can reach something that is up to maybe 30+ inches away. If there are no obstacles between you and the track.
But can you you really get your hand in there to couple and uncoupe when you have to go over the roof of a building that is between you and the track ? And can you see what you are doing there ?
Potensial trouble spots that still are there - see my last recommendations :
1) Between Purple and red building in upper right hand corner. Not only is the track hidden behind a building at the edge of your reach. Is it also potensially in a small "canyon" between two buildings. Those buildings are separated only by the width of one track. How tall are those buildings ? Can you even get your hand in there ?
2) Medusa. Adding Reliable warehouse between you and the Medusa track makes reach issues worse instead of better. I think it would be very hard to reach cars between Reliable and the wall, and you have almost no access to the track in front of Medusa. I would recommend just dropping Reliable warehouse rather than put it here, and maybe bring Medusa south a bit.
3) Hardwood furniture. Same recommendation as the last time.
I recommend making some mockups of cardboard and testing your reach past buildings here.
Hi All-
So I've made some further adjustments (quite frankly, looking back at my last design it's clear I didn't do enough in my last draft to make changes. So I've posted my latest version and the highlights of changes are below along with some requests for knowledge from others who might know more than me:
Incinerator - I orginally modeled my industrial pier district on the marine repair facilties found along my inspirational prototype but the more I looked at it the less I liked how it was looking. So I spent some time thinking, and wanting to keep my "mid to late 70's urban decay" motif I had a "eureka" moment. It's garbage incinerator time! The gargabe incinerators will be fed from barges offloaded from the pier into open gondolas. I was looking for any kind of prototypical example of this happening, but I can't find much of anything in the way of online resources about incinerators whatsoever. If anyone can help point me towards some resources on this it would be much appreciated. Also, I'm thinking I should change out some of hte buildings that are part of the complex, but I'm a little unsure as to what would be more appropriate
Transload - I've also brought back the transload facility that was on my very first (and very flawed!) layout design. My thinking is that there would be plenty of businesses in this heavier industrial district not served by their own sidings but instead by a heavy use team track like this. I've also relocated the two backdrop industries that were by the now-incinerator that were in a hard to reach area, but there wasn't a way to do it as far as I could find without having a facing point siding. I also chose to run the switching lead around the incinerator plant as it gave me about 3-4 extra inches to reverse, but I could cut them out if people still think this would pose operational challenges.
Thanks again for your thoughts, I look forward to hearing more.
Best,
Rich
On the top of the plan if you brought the track with the two industries on it straight across and tied it into the tail, you could gain an additional 1 or 2 cars of tail room on the switchback.
The tail on the left side switchback is very short, I doubt you could pull or spot a full track, let alone two if there was a car in the hardwood furniture co. I am wondering how you are going to spot those tracks anyway. Lets say you have a mix of 50 and 60 ft cars (boxes, flats and covered hoppers, typical transload cars) 3 in the back track, 4 in the middle track and 2 in the short track. You have 1 to put in the back track, 2 in the middle track and 2 in the short track. How are you going to do it?
I wouldn't do an incinerator. If the garbage comes in by barge, then the ashes probably go out by barge. If you want decay, then do a scrap dealer that barges out the scrap or uses the site of an old industry that recieves metal from scrapped ships and piers and loads it into gons. Another decrepit industry is a scrap apaper dealer that compresses waste paper and cardboard into bundles and ships it out to paper mills in 50 ft boxcars (like the IPD cars.).
Dave H.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
Thanks to both of you on your latest replies. I have a few questions/clarifications for both of you:
Would a scrap paper dealer bring in waste products by barge? I would love to create a dynamic tying the pier to the nearby plants, so would the waste paper come in by barge and out in the boxcars? Something like that to create some small local moves (justifying the existance of an independent industiral switching railroad) rather than moves that bring cars on and off the layout from staging and the outside world.
Also, the lead to the transload facility - if you only count up to the edge of the ajoining industry - is about 40" so I'm planning to remove my current staging track to push Hardwood Furniture further "east" and have my staging feed off of the yard lead just aove George roberts printing with a cassette style track.
On the double tracking, I like the idea (I was originally working with that type of concept originally) but now I'm finding myself tight on space. I'd love to get rid of one of the 3-ways just for the sake of asthetics but I'm having a heckuva time figuring out how to run a parallel track close to the transload that leads into a switch just east of river city textiles. I cant seem to make the space work so any thoughts on how I could get that to go would be listened to.
Thanks agian to everyone who has offered assistance...