My planned layout features a large car float which I would like to incorporate into the operation of the layout. I don´t mean it to be a static feature, but to make it detachable/movable, in order to simulate the arrival/departure of floats.
If a have a set of floats, they can be used for staging.
This is the layout which is behind the idea:
I have absolutely no idea how I could design this, without sacrificing prototypical look for function. Help is highly appreciated.
First thought out of my head - make the car floats as fairly detailed models, but have the piece of water that they sit in removable. So you aren't handling a detailed model, nor do you have to make some more crude but also more sturdy float model.
Second thought - instead of making a 'hollow' model, use a solid piece of hardwood as the core and attach the detailed bits around it, makign a car float that has all the detail of a fine model but at its heart is a solid chunk of wood that will stand up to handling.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. Are you looking for suggestions on overall layout design, or the mechanics of using multiple car floats as "casettes?"
I am planning an extension of my own layout, and a car float terminal is high on my list. I'm planning to use the Walthers car floats and the matching Walthers bridge.
My plan is to have the floats sit inside the "water," which will be poured Envirotex. I plan to use tape or plastic wrap around the hull when I do the pours, so I can remove the floats after the Envirotex sets. If I do this right, the hull should line up perfectly every time by simply putting it into the opening in the water scenery. Something else I'm considering is making the "water" removeable along with the floats. But, these floats are already quite large, and adding the surrounding water might make them too awkward to carry around.
I would arrange for some sort of restraint on the float to keep the cars from rolling off the ends. This wouldn't be prototypical, but I think it's necessary for safely transporting the car floats to and from the layout.
My "imagineering" idea is to build a "floating" platform, supported by springs, that the floats would sit on. This would tilt slightly depending on the weight distribution of the cars on the float, forcing you to consider this when loading and unloading the cars. However, this would also require some flexibility in the bridge, and I'm not sure how well that would work.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I have had this with my old Westport. Barge and apron were scratch build.
Wolfgang
Pueblo & Salt Lake RR
Come to us http://www.westportterminal.de my videos my blog
MisterBeasley or the mechanics of using multiple car floats as "casettes?" I
or the mechanics of using multiple car floats as "casettes?"
I
That is exactly my intention! I have not yet seen the Walthers car float, but my idea was to drill two or more small holes into the hull to act as sockets holding the hull in place, providing that the car float is a "waterline" model.
As Mister Beasley stated the biggest problem will be keeping the cars on the car float when moving them from storage to the layout. Even with a gate at the end, if the cars are free to roll they will move and derail. Just giving the float a slight bump may derail the cars. With the close track spacing of the float car they will be hard to rerail.
So, there arfe two key issues attached to the problem:
Issue no. 1 can be solved if id build the float as a waterline model and have some holes for receptacle pins sticking out of the "water" thus securing the float in position. Securing the cars on the rails - are there any ideas around?
Are you wanting to make them move? I saw a video several years ago about an O scale layout that had ships that moved. The basic design idea was that they had metal plates in the bottoms of the ships and the "water" was a sheet of plexiglass. An HO scale train underneath the water pulled a car with a strong magnet, which pulled the ships along.
I don't remember the name of the layout or the video.
As you can imagine, the ships sometimes had a herky-jerky motion due to the friction between the ship bottom and plexiglass, and going around corners looked kinka ridiculous..
cacole Are you wanting to make them move?
Are you wanting to make them move?
... not in a sense of the floats "moving" around. Just use them as a cassete for staging, thus simulating arrival/departure of floats at the terminal.
An OP session would then start with putting some cars on the float, putting the float in place at the apron, switch the cars off the float, switch other ones onto the float, take the float away, put another float "cassete" loaded with cars onto the apron ....
Adds a little "tang" to opearte the layout.
Or is there another idea?
The single-ended car floats I remember from a half-century ago had steel track bumpers at the ends of the tracks, so the main problem is preventing the cars from rolling off the end where float meets apron. With my cassettes, which are a lot longer than the standard car float, I just make sure that I tip the cassette toward the closed end once I've separated it from the end of fixed track.
As for handling the float, the prototypes took quite a beating, evident in the multi-colored paint and rust along the rubbing strakes, especially at the apron end. I recall them having rows of truck tires along that end, to fend off the 'egg cup' of pilings that centered them as they approached the apron. Additional tires were hung off the sides where the tug was secured to them when under way.
Those tires just gave me an idea. Perhaps the solution would be a lifting frame something like the ones used for handling containers, a broad, shallow H shape with 6 inch long hooks hanging from each corner. By engaging the hooks in strategically located fender tires you could lift the float untouched by human hands and carry it like a suitcase.
As far as derailing cars, smooth and steady does it. Sudden jolts or too-quick sideways moves cause problems, so make sure that they don't happen. (I don't recall ever having a car derail in normal cassette operation, and I'm a long way from having a dancer's grace of movement.)
Chuck (Native New Yorker modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Chuck,
if I add a "bumper" with a coupler at on end of the float (which needs not to be bi-directional) that the cars can couple into would mean at least half of the problem solved. Adding a little moree weight to the cars to make them a a little more "inert" will also help. But then h2 release the coupler ...
The idea with the truck tires as fenders dsguising "grips" for a handle is great... thank you!
Do you want the easy way or the hard way?
Easy Way
Make the car float enclosed. Do an internet picture search for Lake Michigan Car Ferry and you will have a general idea. Now design your water level at low tide so a ramp down to the car ferry is needed. One or two cars at a time can handle a fairly steep ramp. Now you have a situation where the back side of the car float only needs to be long enough to give the appearance it is full length except it isn't. Then cars can be loaded onto the ferry and exit through the back side to a storage track or tracks. Problem solved.
Hard way
Mount the car floats on movable carts and don't have any water showing in front of them on the viewer side. Roll one out. Roll the new one in having a cut out in the water that the ferry can slip into. this will require all casters to have swivel capability and a smooth floor. You should be able to mount some kind of swinging door to keep the doors on the floats until just before installation when it would be lowered.
Dear Ulrich
Just a wild idea. If you build the ferry terminal behind the transfer crane in combination with hidden staging behind the warehouses you could pull off the old trick. When nobody is looking change the consists. Since i saw KR&DC longtime ago in mrr-magazine, i've been puzzling how to change the cars on the ferry. Or just fiddle the cars?
Any how, good luck finding the best solution.
Paul
ndbprr Mount the car floats on movable carts and don't have any water showing in front of them on the viewer side. Roll one out. Roll the new one in having a cut out in the water that the ferry can slip into. this will require all casters to have swivel capability and a smooth floor. You should be able to mount some kind of swinging door to keep the doors on the floats until just before installation when it would be lowered.
We have/had a modeler in the local area who "does/did" just this on his layout -- I haven't seen him in quite and when he retired from the state he may have moved to other climes. I had seen his layout on a couple of other occasions but on a day a couple of year ago I was invited over to observe an operating session. It was quite interesting to watch and, although I am oriented more to "long train" operation I am faced with the prospect of having to orient my future layout more towards switching operations and I have given cursory thought to incorporating some sort of a rail-to-barge operation.
This particular individual loads one of his "barge modules" at his loading slip and rolls it out of the way atop a cart; he then removes this module and stores it on racks built under his benchwork. He then extracts a full "barge module", mounts it on his cart, and rolls it into place at the slip where it is unloaded. His switcher -- on this particular day he was using a GP38-2 -- assembles these cars taken off this "barge module" into a train and runs it down the track into an adjacent bedroom where he has a yard as well as a number of industries for switching. He did not have enough capacity to assemble more than one barge into a train so movements, of necessity, involve short consists.
He is a "lone wolf" operator and he indicated that he usually performs about two of these "barge module" operations during an operating session; each barge was about 32" long and held up to 16 fifty foot cars -- 4 cars on 4 tracks. He wasn't really interested in detailing barges and tugs so his "barge" in this case was a length of 1 X 10 pine with track attached. With two of these operations he is handling about 64 cars a day into and out of off-line storage during each operating session and that was enough to keep him pretty busy. Because of the slow speeds involved it probably took close to half-an-hour per barge operation -- loading one and unloading another -- so he easily ate up an hour with this operation; do this twice a day and you can see that this was probably the major operation on his layout. All I was able to observe on this particular day was a pre-assembled train run out to dockside, this barge exchange operation, and a train run back into the inbound track at the marshalling yard in that second bedroom. I didn't really get into what kind of operating system he used to switch his layout but there were bins usually associated with a car card operation at all switching locations; on this particular day, however, these bins were empty.
I will guess that he must have had about 20 of these "barge modules" which would give him an off-layout storage of 320 or so cars; add to that cars yarded in the marshalling yard in the other bedroom as well as those spotted on industrial tracks around the layout and I would guess that he probably had well over 400 cars showing; he was a grass bachelor and model railroading was his passion and I suspect that he probably had a multitude of other cars stored in drawers or elsewhere. He was interested in "servicing industry" rather than "long train-long run" operations and he got that with this off-the-layout storage concept; he had grown up somewhere in the New York City area and he probably was somewhat familiar with rail-to-barge transfer operations.
This kind of operation was really interesting and, stated earlier, I had never seen this sort of operation before and I was very surprised that an hour went by so quickly.
I might add that a couple of people have addressed the issue of how to keep our cars from sliding off our vessel and taking a 200 plus foot plunge into the recesses of Ironbottom Canyon called that because of the amount of iron that has assembled at the bottom. Anyway, the late Ed Ravenscroft of Glencoe Skokie Valley fame used a movable pin system to hold his cars on a grade; it worked! and because these pins came up under the car they were almost unobservable from trackside.
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
It took a while to find this. A while back, Tim Warris ("FastTracks") put this photo essay on the web for all of us to look at:
http://www.bronx-terminal.com/?p=1608
The links get lost for a couple of pages, but then they come back. Just keep hitting "Next Page." The photo essay gives you a pretty good idea of the size of the Walthers float, and the magnitude of the project.
Thanks again, Tim. It's great work, and very well presented.
The only engineering help I can offer is that your tug is facing the wrong way in the drawing. The bow should be pointed toward the front end of the barge, and the apron. It is easier to maneuver a barge into a slip if the tug is going forward. If the tug is pulling the barge away, it backs in reverse (astern), so that the bow is still facing forward when it gets to the next dock. I have a Walthers barge and tug (modified to steam, of course); I like the look of waterline models on shower-door glass (wavy). I hadn't given much thought to moving the barge; I have lots of staging elsewhere. I'd probably use the old five-finger switcher, and "fiddle" the cars onto the handy shelves below.
More archives. I took this picture at the Treasure Coast Model Railroad Club in Port St. Lucie, Florida. They have a pair of Walthers car floats with Walthers bridges. I talked with them while they were still planning this, and they had planned to use the floats as casettes. However, when I look at the picture, it looks like the water was probably poured with the floats in place, so they're not going to come out easily.
I think they did a great job of detailing this scene. The corrugated metal bulkheads and the wood pilings look very realistic, and of course, I love that dirty water.
Thank you for all the input, folks.
I now have a fair idea of what I have to do.
I am not yet sure, which way I will go!
An old trick from an old, old Model Railroader. Glue a bristle or two in the right places between the rails.
0The bristle should be just long enough to barely catch an axle on a car. Being flexible, they will not interfere with normal operation.
By the way, mount the bristles off center so that they do not interfere with the uncoupling pins.
larsend An old trick from an old, old Model Railroader. Glue a bristle or two in the right places between the rails. 0The bristle should be just long enough to barely catch an axle on a car. Being flexible, they will not interfere with normal operation. By the way, mount the bristles off center so that they do not interfere with the uncoupling pins.
- I am overwhelmed - what a super idea! Thank you!
Sir Madogprobably difficult to put the cars onto the rails there.
You may find one of these helpful:
It's a "Rail-it" from RIX Products. Put it on the track, roll the cars down the ramp and they're railed. I've got mine Velcroed to a a benchwork leg. I think it would work fine on the Walthers car float.
Simplicity rules!
How come I always think in so complicated terms?
Thank you!
Was thinking about this today at work, since I'm going to have a carfloat myself at some point, & would also like to use it as a cassette while looking real while on the layout.
Why not mount a type of sponge / foam to the bottom of the car float? Either one big pad or a stip of ribbon around the edges.
Some thing unobtrusive (1/4"?) of the right density so that you can pour the water & stipple the waves/caps as much as you want, the foam will contour them & provide a flat top.
If you get the foam the right thickness / firmness, it would also provide the slight side to side motion from the weight of the cars in operations.
I have some 3/8" dark grey foam ribbon (sticky on one side) that's used to insulate doors & windows that might work.
& since foam "deflates" over time, with the ribbon you could just peal it off & apply a new strip.
In my head this has the potential to flow a bit better than the spring idea, & allows for realistic water when the float is removed.
Just thinking out loud.
Good luck!--Mark
M.C. Fujiwara
My YouTube Channel (How-to's, Layout progress videos)
Silicon Valley Free-moN
I have given up the idea of a removable/exchangable car float some more thoughts. A smooth performance in this segment is essential for the operation of it and a car float that´s just looking nice is of no value.
I will have to follow a different approach, not integration the car float fully into the layout, thus being a littlke bit more free in its design.
The following plan shows what I try to express:
This opens up some more options, like multi-track traverser etc. to enhance operation.
If you don't mind i have some questions
Have fun , good luck
Paul, just a short answer to your questions:
I need to have pics like that to nurture my "imagineering".