Operations 2: Switching Spots

I'll start with naming the locations on my layout that will require switching.

First is  the interchange track with the South Shore Line (Chicago South Shore & South Bend RR) and the Roarin' Elgin (Chicago Aurora & Elgin RR aka The Great Third Rail). The reason d être for the layout. This spur holds five cars.

From left to right there is Armstrong Hardware (provisional name), a big building that hides the entry to the off stage track, which has three spots for cars.

Dominating the center of the layout is Chestnut Warehousing (provisional name), another big building that has three car spots.

On the right hand side of the layout is the North Shore freight house, come Railway Express Agency, building that can hold four cars.

Finally the adjacent team track, which also has the capacity to hold six cars.

That means if one assume about 50% capacity then the layout will handle ten, or eleven freight cars before it starts to clog up with too much traffic. I'm going to assume that five cars are exchanged daily with the two connecting railroads via the interchange. I'm then going to assume that half of the remaining cars will rotate off after being unloaded, or loaded, which is two freight cars a day coming in, balanced by two leaving each day.

What I don't have a real feel for is how reasonable this level of traffic is for a small interchange yard like this one? Is it too much, about right, or too little? I don't know. Any opinions would be welcomed.

Five Box Car Reds

The term box car red describes something that in real life encompassed a range of colours that depended on the mix of the paint. Railroads specified the percentages of each ingredient, based on preferences and cost.

The better pigments cost more, with the definition of better being longer lasting colour when the paint is exposed to sun light. The two classic ingredients were iron oxide red versus red lead.

So if I line up five boxcars, say from the Southern, Santa Fe, SP, UP and PRR, the colours should progress from brown, to rich red-brown, to (what we think of as) box car red, to oxide red, to orange oxide red. Well I don't have that exact combination, but I am able to show five box cars red demonstrate this range from cars painted in iron oxide red to those painted using red lead.

 The brownest box car I have is this N&W PS-1 from Kadee.



With just a hint of red to it this AT&SF PS-1 from Kadee fills the next spot for a rich red brown car.



Falling into the mid point, the classic box car red, is this RI 50 foot SD from Proto 2000.



This C&NW PS-1 car from Kadee fits the bill for a oxide red freight car.



Finally, the classic orange oxide red of this PRR War Emergency gondola from The Tichy Train Group.



And just to make the comparisons in the same lighting all five freight cars in a line, which also demonstrates how we perceive colour changes according the light we view the colour in. In this case artificial light for the individual models, whereas the group shot is predominately daylight tinged with some background artificial light that was on in the room. Here I can't see the colour difference between the N&W and AT&SF freight cars, as they both look just brown to me at this distance. Close up I can see a difference.

Moral of this is that there is no one shade of box car red, and variety will therefore add realism to the freight car roster. What is of course just as interesting is each manufacturers interpretation of a railroads red and the variance between each, but I'll keep that for another time.

C&NW 46557 Flat Car: Update

At last the finishing line. Coupler cut levers done, deck weathering redone, and I replaced the round wire brake rod with some square brass (filed down from one thirty second square section to size).

 Here is the close up showing everything fitted and painted.



The floor looks a lot better with the extra black wash and Testors Dullcote applied.

 

Final glamour shot of the finished flat car, the first of many.
 

Operations 1: A Preamble

If anything divides the British and American model rail communities it is operating layouts.

As a British modeller I know that operations tend to be based on timetables with an emphasis on passenger operation, and when it comes to freight it is all about shunting the wagons. The aim of the layout is to parade a set of prototypical looking trains that represent the service that ran on the line.

From an American perspective operations are the big goal, the one thing that that brings all the facets of the hobby together. As such schemes involving waybills and switch lists have evolved, with the running of trains by train order, or through a Centralised Traffic Control scheme. The aim to represent the traffic generated by the railroad business.

Of course in Britain, say on the West London for instance, I would see about 184 trains a day run up and down the line that is about seven miles in length. On the North Shore line they advertised of 38 trains daily to Milwaukee on a line that was about 86 miles in length.

So the whole traffic density thing is rather different.

Nowadays if I see a 60 wagon train I think whoo-hoo a long freight train. In America I would be waiting for 10 minutes for the train to run past and I'd lose count of the number of freight cars in it. So it is in no way surprising that the difference in what operating a layout entails differs so much from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

So what do I see as the things American and British layout operations have in common?

Well slow running speed for a start. About 5 scale mph while shunting, and about 15 scale mph while running up and down the yard. I think that the locations on the layout should be named for what they are; the goods shed, or freight shed in American parlance. The operations are some sort of point-to-point scheme, in my case an out and back from the fiddle yard, staging tracks, to the hidden storage again.

My layout is small enough that it really needs hidden storage tracks to represent the rest of the world, where I can fiddle with consists and rebuild them to maintain the illusion of an operating railroad. I've also set my sights very tight. Burham Yard is an interchange and industry area, not a classification yard. The majority of my operations will be bridge traffic, which is exactly what the real North Shore Line had to contend with. My only twisting of reality is the location of the yard itself, and that is a choice based on the pragmatic reality of the space I have.

I shall also be using the rules from an employee timetable. When it comes to waybills versus switching lists, I'm leaning now more towards a switching list as I think given the size and type of layout it will work for me better.
 

Locust Shipping

A much easier cut and shut job on this building as all I had to do was make sure that the angle matched the location on the layout.

This was another just get the building shell together for the layout project.

From the side that can be seen.

Et voilà the building as part of the landscape.

Trucks, Wheels & Derailing

I clearly remember buying NWSL wheels with 1.015 axle lengths. Said so on the packet even! I have even checked their website and they sell wheels with flush ends, and pinpoints with axle lengths 1.015 and 1.025. What is the point of this I hear you ask?

Well, actually that is an interesting question. I've been having problems with freight cars derailing, in particular my Proto 2000 tank cars that have Kadee AAR standard trucks, colloquially known as Bettendorfs, which is incorrect, unless the AAR standard trucks were made by Bettendorf (just showing off my freight car credentials here), and laying out my Railway Prototype Modeller agenda. Those of you who are not interested in such things you should look away now, before I go into uber geek model maker mode.

Okay, all of you who are still reading can sit back and relax while I talk you through the problem...

I was talking to Bill of Mousa Models about ordering some wheels with 1.020 axles from NWSL as a special order. I quite like NWSL wheels, because they don't wobble and therefore run true. He quite rightly asked why bother as I can just use the 1.015 axles I have, as five thou shouldn't make any real difference? I said well, I've researched another manufacturers site, Reboxx, and downloaded their PDF that recommends 1.020. We agreed to disagree, as friends can.

However, Tony Thompson reminded me of tram-lining wheels on his blog, which I can't find the link to post here. Perhaps Tony might consider putting tags on his posts to help searching for stuff? Just a suggestion.

Anyway, I thought to myself, lets test the assumption that five thou will not make any great difference.

The way I did this was by taking a Kadee AAR truck and begin measuring the axles Kadee supplied, which turned out to be 1.020. Then I started working on calculating the depth of the journal boxes and the total amount of play across the axle length when the wheels are in the journals. What I found was a range of "slop" between 0.016 to 0.021 of an inch each side, or 0.42mm to 0.54mm, which means that there is a range of movement from 0.032 to 0.042 of an inch, or 0.82mm to 1.08mm across each axle.

This is not good, as it means that the amount of slop in each axle might result in the wheels not being in line with each other. To me this seems like way too much slop.

I then wondered about what length of axles I should be using?

So I started by measuring the axles in my tank cars and found that they were not 1.015, but rather 1.010. Okay only five thou difference, so no real biggie, but those five thou's add up, and ten thou, approximately 0.25mm, would be a thing to be concerned about. At this point I just had to go through and measure all the axles of all my wagons, which took the rest of the morning.

Didn't have many 1.015 axles, in fact they all seemed to hover around 1.010, ranging from 1.007 up to 1.013. So about three thou either side of 1.010. So I thought, ah ah! I've either bought the wrong wheels, or NWSL had a packing glitch. The evidence being that I found seven axles that were 1.005, and three axles at 0.997 of an inch.

Then I went and checked the website and found that NWSL don't market Code-88 wheels with either  1.005, or 1.010 axles, which made me think further. My conclusion is that NWSL manufacturing tolerances will not meet my needs.

My best guess at the axle length I need is 1.030 (this is 1.010 from my original axle, plus 0.32, less 10 thou, which I consider to be an acceptable amount of slop, which comes to 1.032), but this is a bit of a guess, because it is dependent on the manufacturing tolerances of both Reboxx and Kadee being consistent. So fingers crossed Reboxx here I come. I will report back when the order arrives in a few weeks.