08-21-2011, 01:55 PM
Brakie Wrote:PGR has a unique operation at Lakeville..They have facing point switches with no runaround..
What to do?
They simply keep one SW1500 to handle these industries with facing point switches on the far end of their track the conductor takes over the engineer's job and the engineer becomes the conductor while switching the facing point industries...
I discussed making a layout based on this industry park a few years ago with Jim Hedinger (who wrote an article about the park in Model Railroader Magazine), and Joe Fehr, who works for PGR, both very nice and helpful gentlemen. There is quite a bit of information on the PGR in the LDSIG yahoo group discussions at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ldsig
Among other things, back then they did interchange with the CPR in an interesting way:
First the PGR pushed their outbound cars a couple of train lengths north on the main, tied them down there, and then ducked back into the industry park
The CPR train arrived northbound, pulling cars for the industry park, pulling past the switch to the Airlake park:
While the CPR moved their engine from the north end of the inbound cars to the south end of the outbound cars, the PGR engine grabbed inbound cars:
Jim Hedinger further described what happened like this: "About a third of the cars were left on Prorail's lead track, and rest were pulled as far east into the park as possible.
The Prorail crewman that made the cut on the lead track now became the engineer of the west-end switcher, and his partner became the ground man as they began distributing cuts of cars from the west end, moving things around into the longer spurs to free the east-end engine.
Then they went about sorting and delivering the inbound cars one cut at a time. As they went, they¹d group cars for delivery in the opposite direction so they didn¹t have to change engines very often. They also grouped the empties and set them into spurs that had already been switched."
Smile,
Stein