01-12-2009, 10:51 AM
This aerial view of the yard from near the other end shows the track arraingment pretty well. The passenger cars are on the main, the next two tracks are the thru receiving and departure tracks, then the next three trcks are stub ended yard tracks. The next track is the yard runaround track. To the right of all these is the new trackage laid for the engine facility. They connect to runaround track about 3' below the bottom of the picture. The left hand track is for oubound locos while the next is for inbound. Both can get coal and sand and water. Only the inbound track has an ashpit. The ash conveyor was scratchbuilt as I found no reasonably priced kit of the prototype I wanted. The coaling tower and sandhouse/tower are Walthers kits. You see the service track behind the ash conveyor and coal tower. I modified the coaling tower so that the track needn't be elevated. I have to admit I did not find any pics of situations where the track was not elevated. I'm not sure why the track would need to be elevated, the elevator in the tower needs to lift the coal to the top anyway. Perhaps to avoid the neccesity of digging a pit to dump into? At any rate, elevating the track would have caused me problems, as I desired to use just one track to service all functions, ash, coal, sand and diesel fuel. The track furthest to the right, which splits into two tracks just behing the ash conveyor, are diesel ready tracks. The yard is primarily used for changing power on thru trains. Diesel only to the east, mostly stean to the west. Cuts of cars are exchanged for both a couple locals which run out of the yard and for interchange with other roads, coming in from hidden staging (down the helix). You see a piece of masonite sitting above the yard tracks just before they hit the helix. Trains will run out of sight from this point east. On the far side of the structure, which will be the corp. offices, there will be a parking lot ove the tracks, which you will not even know are there.
