Lack of humping

[Anonymous]

A lack of humping is a good thing, David, at the animal shelter. Oh!!!, you mean railroad hump yards! Yea, they eat up a lot of space. As for car retarders, I vaguely recall one solution was a piece of clear nylon "wisker" sticking up between the track to scrape the bottom of the car to slow it down.
Maybe there's a use for old tooth brushes.

[Don Gibson]

Problems modeling a 'hump yard' are not the track (easy) - it's the 'rolling.

Once a car start's rolling how do you stop it?
Not all cars roll equally. Some stop halfway down.
Some bang and break couplers.

Real railroad's use retarders that gage the speed and computers figure out just how far and fast it needs to go.

[egmurphy]

They take a lot of space, model cars don't coast nearly as well as real cars so operation isn't as reliable as one would like, and car retarders are very difficult to model. There are a few reasons to start off with.


Regards

Ed

[METRO]

My thought is that it's because of the difficulty of controling car speed off the hump. I wouldn't want to add one to my line because I'd be afraid of any damage my freight could take while crashing into eachother as they classified. If someone could make a model speed-retarder this issue would probably become moot, but until then, my rolling stock is just a bit too delicate to throw down a grade into eachother.

~METRO

[FJ and G]

With so many hump locomotives sold, why are hump yards so rare. In many years of searching, the only photo I can find on the internet is of a hump yard under construction:

http://www.railroadmuseum.net/images/Hump%20Yard%2040221a.jpg