Gary S Wrote:The structure was built some time ago, now that I am finally finishing it, I notice that the "door" itself has vertical corrugations instead of horizontal. It almost looks like they welded a sheet of corrugated steel across the openings. I have actually never seen these doors being used. I wonder if they have been completely abandoned.

I don't think those are metal corrugations on the door. They look way to big. I'm wondering if the doors slide on tracks sideways to open instead of rolling up? The other possibility is that the move up and down like an old style solid wood garage door. The vertical corrugations may be some type of dense foam used for insulation. If they had disabled the doors, I don't think they would have left the hydraulic ramps in place, and the curtains would also have either been removed or would have fallen into disrepair. In short, everything looks to well maintained and cared fro to indicate that the doors are no longer used.

By the way, are the ramps commercial castings or did you cast those up your self?

Gary S Wrote:... Several great structures from Reinhard, now just have to figure out how to incorporate them into the layout. ...

Looks like there are some smaller parts somewhere in the carton that need to be glued back in place.

Yep, I retrieved everything out of the box before it was discarded

Russ, I agree, the doors and apparatus certainly are in good repair. However, in five years of visiting this place, I have never seen a car at those doors. I hear that they give tours of the facility, I need to check into that.

faraway Wrote:

Gary S Wrote:...and a photo of the model door and the real door....

My first thought was, "ha, he posted the same photo twice".... :o Very well done

I had to do a double-take myself..!!
That's one awesome staging yard...How many cars does it hold..??

Like the Man said....The long wait was well worth it....

Gary, what era are you modeling? Do you belong to the Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society? The current issue of the "Warbonnet" publication has an nice article on the sulpher unit trains from Rustler Springs, Texas to the port at Galveston. The Santa Fe hauled them as unit trains to Galveston where they were handed over to the S.P. to deliver to the old S.P. wharves. The last of the mines closed and the service was discontinued in 1999.

Gus, DocWayne, thanks for the compliments. The staging yard will hold about 15 fifty footers on each track, so 11 x 15 is 165. Then there is also the staging at each end of the layout for the local trains. In the last ops session, there were 284 cars that were moved around on the layout. Approx 180 of those were through-trains, the other 100 were switched in and out of the local industries. There are some big customers, for example, Grocers Supply had about 26 cars, GERN had about 45, and the remaining 30 were single digit car movements to smaller customers.

Russ, I neglected to answer your previous question on the construction of the door ramps. They are pieced together from styrene strip, sheet, and tube.

On the sulphur train, was it molten sulphur in tank cars?

As for era, since I have a few BNSF "swoosh" cars, I'm around 2005.... do have some older cars that probably should have been scrapped by now. :oops:

Gary S Wrote:On the sulphur train, was it molten sulphur in tank cars?

As for era, since I have a few BNSF "swoosh" cars, I'm around 2005.... do have some older cars that probably should have been scrapped by now. :oops:

Yes the sulpher was transported as molten sulphur in tank cars. According to the article, Texas was the leading supplier of sulphur in the world until they started to reclaim sulphur from coal, coke, and oil. Apparently it is so cheap to reclaim sulphur from these other products that mining it ceased to be profitable. The sulphur trains ceased operation in 1999, and the tracks from Pecos north to the BNSF mainline at Clovis, N.M. were removed in 2002.

Hi Gary,

Great to see an update. Also nice to hear that the ops session worked well. You could probably lose a few more crews in there! Our modular setups are similar in size to your "empire", and we may have up to 6 or 8 trains running at once. Couple of branchlines, dedicated switching at one industrial park, working the yard, couple of through freights/unit trains, and coupl eof passenger or excursions out at any given time.

Sure would be great to see more (in person even! ).

Andrew

Fantastic update Gary! Good to see some more progress.

Wow Gary! You got lots of stuff done! I impressed by the hanging staging yard!
Ralph

Hi Gary---no wonder we haven't see your threads lately---looks like you've been busy --- with great results

Is there any point in requesting that your photos be clearly labelled "model" or "prototype"?

Great update, good to hear from you again. I guess you have really had your hands full. Great job(S)
Charlie

Thanks everyone, good to hear from y'all. After the layout tour last November, and having one of the guys from the LHS over for operations, there has been a great interest in my layout from the local folks. I've got another ops session scheduled for the third week in April. I will make an effort to have more of a presence here at Big Blue too.

I do look around the forum every few days, so I have been keeping up with what everyone else is doing to a certain extent.