09-01-2010, 11:00 PM
BR60103 Wrote:Canadian Pacific had a straight version of that in Parkdale (Toronto). Just a flat warehouse with 2 or 3 parallel tracks.
Sure - it was pretty common having several parallel tracks in front of freight houses and produce terminals and places like that - where you would need to load or unload a bunch of cars through other cars. Can give interesting switching on a model railroad by e.g. the simple expedient of requiring e.g. that cars on track 2 be re-spotted to track 1 (i.e. by the dock) if you have to pull the car on track 1.
The interesting (IMO) thing about the track config I stumbled upon above is the way the loading/unloading docks are put in at an angle, with tracks branching off and curving in. Gives you a visually interesting structure which won't be an obvious flat, the flexibility of switching e.g dock 3 independent of the other docks when traffic was low or moderate, and still the option, when things were pretty busy, of spotting several cars in such a way that cars could be unloaded through cars closer to a specific dock.
Grin,
Stein