dave1905

IPD boxcars are really tough because they were scattered to the winds after the IPD program ended and were often patched or repainted multiple times by multiple owners in a short span of years. As others have mentioned, finding pictures on the photo websites is probably the best option. One story about repaints. A leasing company acquired surplus engines from various railroads, patched them with leasing company reporting marks then long term leased them to the UP. The UP ran them through a contract shop to install UP required equipment and repaint them into a UP paint and a UP number series. While they were in the shop, the UP decided to renumber that series of engines, before they had been delivered to the UP. In less than a year some of those engines had 4 numbers and two (or three) paint schemes. The original owner, the patch/repaint leasing company, UP first number, UP second number. Second repaint story. A railroad stored a large number of 50 ft plain boxcars on a branch in cuts of a hundred or so. It ended up that 2 NS boxcars got mixed up in that group. The NS told the railroad they wanted their boxcars back. The railroad said they weren't going to dig out 2 cars out of the middle of all those stored cars, but they would take the first two of their boxcars on the branch (same basic type) and renumber them to the NS series and give them to the NS. Never heard if that is what they did, but that was a true scenario.

Part of it is it would be a HUGE project. Railroads don't track how they paint their cars to begin with. There is no real record that says car ABCD 12345 has paint scheme 327-A on it. Railroad cars aren't sequentially renumbered. If a railroad owns 500 of a class of cars and rebuilds and renumbers 200 of them, it doesn't rebuild and renumber them in sequential order. It routes the first 200 cars of that class it can get its hands on to the shop and the shop works them as they come in and will renumber them in the order they go out. Basically you just have to find a picture. One other consideration is age. The car in the picture was new in 1976. That would make it 40 years old in 2016. In earlier eras freight cars were limited to 40 years, that was extended to 50 years and in certain cases a class of cars can be extended to 65 years.

That would be a later version of the engine. The B23-7's were delivered in the 2200-2300 series and then renumbered into 4600 series to make room for additional GP38-2's. They were used on locals and through freights. The steps make them less desirable as switchers (compared to the GP38 and GP15 engines) although the MP used just about every 4 axle as a switcher at one time or another. A lot of them ended up on rock hauling jobs in South Texas. Later they were renumbered into the 100-200 series numbers and some ended their careers as radio control brake dummies (no engine, just housed radio control apparatus.

You need some metal buildings and it can be pretty overgrown with vegetation in places, it's a sub tropical climate. Lots of vines, lots of tall grasses.

Those Mantis cranes are really cool pieces of equipment. The neat thing about them over sidebooms is if you have a derailed double stack, they can pick the containers off the top level of double stack quite easily. On that black material under the tracks, I wonder how much of that is cinders from countless camelback steam engines, since this is the former LV or CNJ.

I apologize for my tone. Knowing from first hand experience that we can run hundreds of 8,000-15,000 ft, 10,000-20,000 ton trains at 40-60 mph across thousands of miles of track every day, I was reacting to the comment that US railroads are in terrible shape.

Not how it works here in the states at all.

If it's Louisiana you ought to have a chemical plant.

Having equipment to resolve a problem and having the line shut down to investigate a problem are two separate things. Having to wait for an investigation is a purely bureaucracy thing. This isn't rocket science, it doesn't take that long to gather relevant information to determine the cause of a derailment and a lot of that can be undertaken while the recovery response is being organized or even while some repairs are being made. Ironically, the fact that US roads are predominately freight may make the repairs of the lines and restoration of service more time sensitive than if the lines were mostly passenger. You can bus passengers around an outage, you don't have those same options with 50-100 thousand tons of coal. Railroad wrecking equipment is very expensive to own and maintain. And despite what y'all think, it isn't used that often. Rather than one railroad owning equipment and only using it once a month (or less), it is waaaaaaaaay more cost effective for a contractor to own a set of equipment and then it be used by multiple railroads. The contractors can disperse the equipment better.

You do realize that the UP alone has roughly 3 times as much track mileage as the entire British national rail system and it is one of 6 major railroads in the US. In the US there are different classes of track based on the speed and operating conditions. Much of that "poor infrastructure" is in reality low grade lines that aren't going to be operated at high speeds regardless of track quality. There isn't any point to maintaining a line to 125 mph standards when you are only going to operate one freight train a day at 20 mph over the line. By all indications, this derailment had absolutely nothing to do with track quality.

Be kind to yourself. Move the grade crossing about 3" to the right and get it out of the switch.

Major US railroads have cars of track panels and ballast standing by at strategic locations and are dispatched as soon as possible. In addition within the first couple hours they are locating track equipment to work on the track. The derailment contractors are ordered generally by "divisions", each division is two sidebooms and a front end loader. They also come in "steel" and "padded" varieties. Steel sidebooms have regular steel tracks and are best on wet or rugged terrain where traction is required. Padded sidebooms have rubber pads bolted to the tracks and are best in yards. They can crawl over tracks without damaging them. A lot of rerailing contractors also use roadable heavy duty cranes to rerail equipment. The cool thing about sidebooms is that two sidebooms can pick up a rail car and walk away with it, 4 sidebooms can pick up and engine and walk away with it.

Those single point switches are very common in trolley and other urban street trackage. Here are scans of a RACOR track products catalog that might give you a cleared look at what paved area switch parts look like. The switch pictured is a double point switch, but the idea is similar.

The Athearn/Roundhouse 2-8-0 and 4-4-0 engines in the green box are excellent runners, as they have all wheel pick up on both the tender and engine drivers. Here is one I modified to be a camelback:

The ORG is handy to find what railroads served what stations and for passenger service. Freight service is less well documented.

Coal was allowed to be in other trains. Most short cuts of coal were spotted by the local that switched the rest of industries. The coal cars were just another car to be spotted, no need to make a special move with just coal cars.

1950's lumber would be plain flats or boxcars. A lot of finish lumber moved in boxcars. 1950's western US would have coal, rock, etc. in drop bottom gons too. Hoppers were more of an eastern thing until the 1960's. Yep, 6 ft door boxcars. 8 ft and double door cars were for machinery and other goods loaded by forklifts.

If you want small cars, in some cases surplus ore jennies (the little short 28 ft hoppers or gons) were cascaded to sand or aggregate service. Rather than a quarry, model an aggregate dealer or a batch cement plant. For the aggregate dealer all you need is a track with an under the rails pit and a conveyor belt. Then add as many dumper trucks and front end loaders as you budget will allow. For the gon style you will need a backhoe type tractor or facility to dig the rock out of the car. Very easy industry to model, very small foot print, very small cars, 100% prototypical and shortline oriented. For example, search for the Omaha Lincoln and Beatrice Railroad.

A lot of the difference between the 4 layout options is what are you doing with the other two tracks. There isn't really a need for a runaound on any of those layouts because there aren't a mix of facing switches, unless you just have to have the engine "leading" into the switching area. or you are designating the center track as a through main track and can have a train enter from either direction. With B,C&D the obvious improvement is to move the end ramp down to the bottom track and have the bottom track (or the stub of the bottom track in B&D) as a team track. As far as switching goes any of the plans can have more or less the same amount of switching, it is after all essentially the same track plan on all three. The only real difference is whether you want one large building or several smaller buildings on the layout. I don't see any reason why you couldn't do both. Make the area around the top track flat and then you can just change out buildings. You could go from 1900 with 34' wood cars and 4-4-0's to 2022 with 50 ft cars and GP38's in a matter of moments by just swapping out buildings and equipment.

One thing to think about is the era. You have rail served creamery, that pretty much screams 1950's or earlier. Not that that is a bad thing, by backdating to the 1950's you can use smaller engines, smaller cars.

Thanks!

Bentonite is a very fine light colored clay. It is used as a binder or filler in a lot of things. For example, it is a binder used in taconite pellets. It is mixed with iron ore, rolled into pellets and baked.

I have used Tichy 18" or 24" grab irons.

Anybody have dimensions (length, height, door width, wheel diameter) for a WW2 French 40&8 boxcar. Asking for someone else who is trying to scale it off of pictures. Or know where there are measured plans for one on line?