TROPICANA DISTRIBUTION CENTER SWITCHING LAYOUT.

[TTRAK_andrew]

G’day all,
Firstly, thank-you all for your complements, they are appreciated.
The Tropicana cars are older Atlas cars gathered of E-Bay, plus some repaints. I have quite a few juice cars, mainly Roundhouse/MDC 57' reefers, not exactly prototype but able to look the part and be available at a reasonable price.
You can see most of my juice cars in active service at:
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The three trucks are old (30+ years) WIKING brand models that cost a fair bit of pocket money when I was a young modeller. WIKING is/was a German brand and hence the postal service 'horn' logo on the yellow truck. Well done for noticing Reinhard!
The layout consists of two small modules are each 310mm long and 150mm wide, plus an extra 310mm long thin `head shunt’ module. The modules are joined by using Kato Unitrack, as per T-TRAK.
The switching operation is concerned with delivering reefers loaded with various frozen Tropicana orange juice products from the two storage tracks to each of the three distribution warehouse doors as required. Each of the nine reefer freight cars that will be occupying the two storage tracks will have two `tags’ on its roof. The tags will have one of three colours to represent different products loaded into that freight car. A coloured four sided dice will be rolled for each warehouse door. On 3 sides of the dice will be the three colours of the tags, plus a `blank’ to represent no products required at that door. When all the required `deliveries are made, the appropriate tags are removed from the top of the reefer. As time goes by some cars will be full, some half full, and others empty. The operator’s challenge is not only to deliver the right loads to the correct doors, but to also steadily move the empty reefers to the rear of the storage tracks to make it easier to access the cars with loads.
Regards,
Andrew G.