Classifying the freights Part 1

From recent posts previously, you will see that I have been doing more and more operations, in particular, by myself. This has proven both rewarding and challenging and has caused the grey matter to work a bit of overtime.

This "Part 1" covers the arrival and switching in and out of the two mainline freights. Part two will go more into detail about actually classifying the loads that have just come in ready to go to the respective local towns.

You see, my yard basically has 2 mainlines with an arrivals / departure track, and then 5 classification tracks and 1 run around track. The problem I have is that there are 6 towns to classify for as well as the Chicago and Seattle towns and thus, far too few yard tracks unless I do some doubling up.

To start with I made the two classification tracks next to the arrivals / departure track available for blocking the Chicago and Seattle outbound loads. Irrespective of which side a local comes in from, cars destined for Chi or Sea could be classified. The remaining 3 classification tracks were then for the remaining 6 towns!

The next problem I had was where to put wagons coming in from a Chi or Sea train once it arrived on the arrivals / departure track? My yard leads were simply not long enough to pull off the incoming loads, then couple at the same time to the outgoing loads and then place them onto the back of the train. After some thinking, I came up with a marvellous plan which is probably standard operations on most other peoples layouts :-).

Instead of a track for Chi and another for Sea, I made the two tracks on the left "Sea Inbound" and "Sea Outbound" and the two tracks on the right, "Chi Inbound" and "Chi outbound".

Now, say a Sea - Chi freight arrived. It would enter from the left to right. A switcher sitting to the left would then remove the "from Sea" and place them on the same line as the To Chi wagons would be, but they would be to the right of the yard as the Chi - Sea train is working the other way. The switcher would then hook onto the "To Sea" wagons and push them onto the waiting train. As simple as that.

Does this not interfere with the classification of the Chi and Sea trains you may ask. Well, both "To" trains are sitting on their respective tracks from the previous ops session if the yard master has done his job correctly. If anything, the yard master is actually waiting for the two freights to arrive before even moving one car on the layout.

So, there you have it. Hopefully I will have a pictorial story in the not too distant future.

Enjoy