Placing Rail Served Industries On Layout Edge

[FCIN]

Brakie, his problem is that he wants to be able two switch out one or two cars inside a building without having to pull the entire cut, and he can't reach the couplers with any available tool when the cars are inside the building.

Exactly, I briefly considered the possibility of using electro-magnets, but it would require about 5 of them to be installed! My structure will hold 5-50ft cars and thus a magnet at each potential cut point and one by the entrance. I don't like the delay feature of Kadee couplers as you are making un-prototypical moves to spot a car; i.e.; spot over magnet, back up to allow couplers to move off center then shove the cars to rest, rather then just shove to rest, then uncouple.

It appears that my idea of modifying a Rix uncoupling tool http://www.rixproducts.com/6280014.htm may work quite well, although using magnets of any type will kill my plans for cutting off the trip pins from the Kadee's. I need only cut the handle off and glue it back on or add a longer handle of plastic so that I can place it inside the structure over the floor with the magnets down between the cars, bunch the slack and there you go! The depth of the structure to track center line won't be more than 3 or 4 inches at most.

Do real railroads and industries do that? In every instance that I know of if an industry receives a cut of cars to load or unload, they complete the work on all of them before they pull any or receive more cars.

They certainly do! It all depends on the facility. You can find this situation at many industries with multiple car spots, especially storage warehouses and similar facilities.

When we worked the case house at Schenley Distillers, they would usually have 5 cars spotted in the building for loading, but only have spots 1, 2 and 3 ready to pull when we arrived. We'd couple into the cut of cars, and make the cut inside the building, pull the outbounds and then spot new empties in their place. Only pulled the whole track if all the cars were billed out or we needed the last car(s) in the cut. Varied greatly from day to day. Same thing at the other distilleries and several warehouse facilities I'm familiar with.