dave1905

The UP re-activated a section of the MKT in Texas, don't remember the exact dates. And the UP recovered some bridges from a trail in Missouri (former MKT) to use when they completed double tracking the St Louis-Jeff City line.

Depends. Sometimes they do that, and stop operating but do not abandon. There is even a "rail bank" program that allows former rail lines to be converted to trails with the provision that it can be reused for rail later on. However.... The question remains whether the line is needed. Why would the rail line be considered to be reactivated? If its just a matter of increased traffic, then in most cases improving the existing line is a better option. Adding an additional main, lengthening sidings, adding CTC are all in most cases a better solution than reactivating a parallel line. I managed the dispatching on numerous "paired track" arrangements where two separate, roughly parallel main tracks are used effectively as double track. The problem is that it is much less flexible than conventional double track. You can't "crossover" because the lines may be 10-50 miles apart in places. Running against the flow becomes very difficult because of the volumes of trains, so local service is a pain. If you have a 100 mile N-S paired track and an industry on the SWD line 20 miles from the south end, you have to haul a car originating from the south end 100 miles to the north end and then 80 miles south to reach the industry. Also if its a longer run, 200-300 miles, then you will have crew change in the middle. Since the lines are 10-20 miles apart typically that means every crew in both directions has to be moved from one line to the other line to go the other direction. Another unexpected issue is uneven rail wear when all the traffic is in one direction on one track because loads tend to go in one direction. For example between Kansas City and Oklahoma on the UP, NWD trains operate on the former MP and SWD trains operate on the former MKT. All the loaded coal and grain trains operate on the former MKT and all the empties operate on the former MP. Therefore the rail wear is uneven. On the other hand between Southern Illinois and Houston the UP runs NWD on the former MP and SWD on the former SP/SSW. In that case the traffic is more balanced. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.

There is a difference between "slack" (excess capacity) and "duplication of routes". Excess capacity is good if traffic is highly variable or if traffic can surge. Duplication of routes is generally not as good because it the most expensive way to "add" capacity. One of the things that saved the US rail network back in the 1970's and 1980's was the government finally giving railroads the ability to shed duplicate routes. The ICG at one time owned 5 N-S routes across the state of Mississippi. At one time there wasn't a spot in Iowa that was more than ten miles for a railroad, really cool in 1880, way, way, way, way over built for 1980. I don't have a problem with reducing duplicate facilities and routes, I do have a problem removing excess capacity in some cases. The problem is it take a railroad 10-20 years to do a large infrastructure improvement in the US (double tracking a 1000 mile route, building a new large yard.) It takes 2 years to buy and receive new locomotives. It takes a year to hire and train new employees. The railroad industry, because of the large lead times is not as nimble to changes. The UP and BNSF spent 20 years building a huge infrastructure to handle Powder River Coal and then it was gone in 5-10 years. There are dozens of cases where the railroad built something to support a growth in an area or industry, only to find that by the time that had is built, the market or technology had changed and they were stuck with a huge "white elephant". One person I worked with started in the signal department. His first job in the signal dept. was installing CTC on a duplicate N-S route to bypass a major terminal and less than a decade later, his last job in the signal department was removing the CTC from that route when things changed and redundant line was no longer necessary. It's tough to know what will happen in a decade.

Sorta. They are also shutting down yards and consolidating trains. A friend of mine is a Yardmaster at KCMO and had video of them knocking down his former yardmaster tower. They are owned by Berkshire Hathaway so don't have to specific stockholder pressure to do things the other railroads are doing.

One has to remember that overall traffic has been declining due to a bunch of factors (low natural gas prices, recession, trade wars, etc.) Most commodities are down at least 10% year over year, some (autos and steel) are down 25% and coal is down 25-30%. If you lose 25% of your business then you don't need 25% of your engines and crews and have more/excess capacity. If you are a railroad with a fleet of 8000 engines, and you cut 25% that means 2000 engines stored. Before I retired several years ago, when costing delays the value of an engine in a delay was negligible because the railroad had an excess supply. Fuel was also much less of a component because it was so cheap. Because so many of the cars in use today are private cars, car hire (per diem) for the use of the cars is driven more by mileage than time, so car hire is less of a factor. One thing that is also different on US railroading is the distance and the number of crews. In US railroading, big trains is big business. A US train can run across anywhere from 2-10 crew districts. If you combine 2 trains into one, you aren't saving 1 crew you are saving 2-10 crews. On multiple track freight routes, a 14,000 ft train occupies more or less the same "slot" as an 8000 ft train. Very little rail traffic is truly "expedited". Most traffic doesn't matter whether it takes 24 hours to get there or 48. Because trains travel such long distances, you can actually speed up the railroad by reducing the number of trains over a long distance. Having 100 trains go 40 mph will OVERALL be faster than having 200 trains half going 40 and half going 60. It might take longer to yard a 14,000 ft train, but incrementally the extra cost is more than offset by the savings of having a bigger train. The risk is when something goes wrong with a 14,000 ft train it can be ugly. On the other hand, when something went wrong with a 8000 ft train and a two man crew, it wasn't pretty either. If you save 30% of your costs and then have 10% higher expenses, you still come out ahead. Not saying I like what's happening in PSR, and I much preferred working for a railroad in a boom, but I started my career pre-Staggers and a lot of what they are doing in PSR was what we were doing when I started. The difference is the technology has allowed a lot more consolidation than we could have ever dreamed of back in 1980.

The postcard is at the intersection of Main and Washington. About 3 blocks from the railroad. It is just under the "R" in "ricaerials.com" on the left edge of the aerial photo. Wikipedia says it was a trolley line and was built in 1905. Also reading the Wikipedia entry for Ardmore, another reason for changes in buildings was the previously mentioned 1915 tank car explosion , which evidently leveled many of the downtown buildings. One thing that Wikipedia doesn't mention is that the line the runs east from Ardmore was the former Rock Island. The depot was a joint facility for both railroads. The station building has a Rock bearskin on one side and an ATSF cross on the other. A couple other photos of the industries.

Could be, there was no overhead wires in the picture so I didn't think of a tram (as opposed to a trolley).

The other thing about the Paul's Valley line is that the line had to have been built by somebody who worked for the PRR or lived near Philadelphia. The first time I drove through that area it was immediately obvious. The towns were named Paoli, Wayne, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Overbrook. Those are all station names on the PRR Main Line west out of Philadelphia. When I commuted to college on the former PRR, I caught the train at Wayne. Having listen to conductors recite those station names day after day while riding the train, it just jumped out at me.

There was a Swift meat dealer in the row of buildings right across from the depot:

Sorta, kinda, depending on the era, no. If you are modeling pre-WW1, the railroad station will be more likely to be at the very center of the town. When the auto arrived, it allowed everything to be more spread out. Since the area right next to the railroad was already spoken form as the town expanded the town moved away from the railroad. Since the "new" stuff was away from the tracks and the "old" stuff was next to the tracks, people gravitated towards the new and abandoned the old. Its not that the railroad was built on the outskirts, the town actually moved itself away from the railroad. What era you pick will determine the distance. The empty lots are places where there were buildings, but as those industries closed down, the buildings were knocked down and became vacant lots. Go back to WW2 and the area would look completely different. One of my favorite sites is "Historic Aerials". Looking back at 1962, you can see that those "vacant lots" were occupied by buildings and freight houses. Here is a post card from the eearly 1900's, not only is Main St close to the tracks, there is a track down the middle of the street. "http://www.jmaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Ardmore-OK-Very-Vintage-Postcard.jpg"

While that may be more true today than in the past, on a particular railroad, at a particular point, you can tell where trains are going or came from based on the cars in the train. The classic example I use is the UP at Ft Worth, TX. The UP has an east-west line that crosses a north-south line. On the N-S line you will see coal trains, grain trains and auto parts, lots of tank cars, virtually no intermodal. On the E-W line you will see lots of intermodal and some autos/auto parts, virtually no coal or grain. Same railroad, two completely different traffic mixes.

I'm confused on the concept. On one hand you are designing what looks like an urban layout and investigating the "Patch" and on the other hand you are talking about ATSF standard depots and house tracks. Kinda polar opposites. By the 1960's LCL was waaaaaaaaay down and it ended in the mid 1970's. I live in Omaha and have relatives in Texas so I drive by the Pauls Valley line on the way to and from visiting relatives. I hope you like red dirt. Here are some pictures I took around the ATSF depot at Ardmore, OK (south of Pauls Valley). Ardmore was a junction where the CRIP crossed the ATSF and the depot was a joint station. Its notable because in 1915 a carload of gasoline blew up and killed 42 people there. On the right end of the depot, in the shade of the tree, is a a memorial to the people killed in the accident.

The large white lights at the top center of the front are the headlights, they are on when the train is moving or occupying the main track. The large white lights on lower front on either sides are "ditch lights", they are on when the train is moving. In the upper corners on both ends are smaller lights that might be off, white, green or red. Off, white and green are classification lights, denoting whether it is a scheduled, regular train a extra or a leading section of a scheduled train. Red is a marker light, denoting the rear of the train. If the train is a regularly scheduled train, the front class lights will be off and the rear marker on the train will be red. If the train is a leading section of a scheduled train, the front class lights will be green and the rear marker on the train will be red. If the train is an extra train, not operating on a timetable schedule, the front class lights will be white and the rear marker on the train will be red.

Interchange means a connection with another railroad. Junction is a connection with the larger ATSF. I'm not fond of the switch back, especially it cuts through the passenger platform. The portion in front for the depot unusable for spotting cars. The other thing that bothers me is that it looks like it would get very jammed up to switch. If you had two cars in each interchange track and brought several cars in your train to go to your interchange, plus had cars to spot and pull from industries, in order to run around cars or to spot the freight house you would have to pretty much clear all or most of the cars from the interchange tracks. I would go for changing the arrangement of tracks on the right side to make it less congested, as in the attached drawing. As far as location, Chicago isn't the only place with big buildings. For the small footprint you have just about any major city on the ATSF would have large brick buildings (Kansas City, Topeka, Oklahoma City, Houston, Ft Worth, Galveston to name the ones I've been in.) I would choose a smaller city. That feels like that "feels" more like the ATSF. Unless of course you want a generic "urban' design because you might want to swap over to more eastern roads later on. Having a depot and freight house buried in an industrial area that is a stub end at Interchange that has passenger service in a big city is also somewhat atypical for the ATSF in a really big city.

Those local types are not confined to "branch lines". I had numerous territories that operated tri-weekly locals and were bona fide "main lines" (two main track, CTC, passenger trains, heavy freight). But the amount of local switching was small enough that it didn't warrant switching everything every day, but was too much with the overhead traffic that the train couldn't make a turn (out and back) in 12 hours. The local type was chosen based on the amount of work and the time it took to do it. Plus there were other labor agreements that entered into it.

Local train service is usually a set pattern. A turn - same crew, same tour of duty (16 hours on duty before 1974) run from A to Z and return to A. Crew runs at least 5 days a week and possibly 7. Tri-weekly service - Crew runs A to Z on Mo-We-Th, gets rest at Z and next day, Tu-Th-Sa, runs Z to A. Off Su. Typically runs 6 days a week. Double daily service - Basically 2 tri-weekly crews on opposite legs. Crew 1 runs A to Z Mo-We-Fr and Crew 2 runs A to Z Tu-Th-Sa. OR crew 1 runs A to Z on even days, Z to A on odd days, Crew 2 runs A to Z on Odd days and Z to A on even days. Trains run 7 days a week. It was common that train service jobs were designed with no days off. Crews would just work as many days as they wanted and then "lay off " and their jobs were covered by the "extra board" a pool of workers that covered vacancies (sickness, vacation, jury duty, etc.) It was common that old heads might work for months straight with no days off, 7 days a week. Passenger service would be scheduled and have a timetable schedule so would have to run on set pattern and nominally run on a schedule. Local service crews are bulletined (they hold a job that has a fixed work pattern and work/off days) and are paid for the days they are scheduled to work (whether they run or not). If the train is a 6 day a week local and you only run it 4 days, you still pay the crews for 6 trips per week. Later, in the 1980's and 1990's local service dropped off enough that branches were often paired, where the crew would run on one branch on Mo-We-Fr and another branch on Tu-Th-Sa.

A combine or coach would be more likely than a caboose for a 1961 mixed train service. If you run a mixed train, you won't run a "local" train to do industry switching, because that's what the mixed train does. You would see either a passenger train and a local, or a mixed train, but not both.

Since 1906, when airbrakes were required in interchange service.

Au contraire. At the end of the line you still need a siding because the engine needs to run around the train to get to the other end of the trains to go back to the other end of the run.

The blades are longer, they are a different shape, they are painted differently. The TO signal in the modern picture is just a place holder to make it look railroady. I wouldn't spend too much time trying to "figure out" the modern signal. They probably had a signal and had a post, so put the signal on the post. Its also possible the SOO replaced the blades between the 1940's and 1980's when train orders went away. The SOO had different TO signals: Now the "SOO Line" painted on the roof is a nice touch.

Its just mounted for effect. Here's what it should look like, you can see the signal mast in front of the depot and the telephone pole on the far end to which the signal is currently mounted:

The "forked" stick was one of three different styles of train order delivery methods. There were two "sticks", one that was a hoop and one that was a forked stick. There was also a "high speed delivery device" that was a bracket with two spring loaded arms. In any case the orders were folded up and tied with a string and the string hooked on the fork or hoop. The fork or hoop would be held up and the engineer or conductor would stick out his arm and put it through the fork or hoop and snag the orders with the loop of string around his arm. On the high speed device the "fork" was held in place by the string and when the orders were snagged, the arms would fold up back against the mast out of the way. They were used in higher speed and volume areas so the operator didn't have to stand next to the tracks. I have handed up orders using the forked stick. You hold the stick at the end of the handle and touch the tip of one of the forks to the nearest rail. That puts you at the right distance from the tracks. There is also a "front" and "back" to the fork, so you have to have it oriented properly. Its amazing how big a freight train is coming at you at 30-40 mph when you are standing only about 6 feet from the tracks. There were different types of orders. Orders that granted authority or didn't grant authority could be handed up on the fly. Orders that restricted authority had to be signed for, so those weren't handed up the train had to stop and the crew come into the office to sign the orders. There were two general processes for train order signals. Some railroads kept the signal at stop and only cleared it when a train showed up and there were no orders for that train (or when the office was closed). Some railroads kept the signal at clear and put it to stop when there was an order for a train in that direction. There were advantages to both processes. I have one of the forked train order sticks displayed in my train room. I found it in a storage room in Newport, AR about 15 years after train orders were retired.

Keith has it basically correct. In the US the distances were so large, the communications were so poor and they needed to accommodate an operations that ran a lot of trains in addition to the scheduled ones, that they needed a system that was flexible and rugged. The base was the timetable, trains that ran according to a schedule. On top of that were overlaid "extra" trains that weren't listed on the time table and exceptions to the timetable. Those situations were handled by train orders. Written instructions in specific formats that told the trains what, where and when to do things. The system was set up that if communications failed, the trains had all the instructions they needed to complete their journey. The train order signal was a signal at a train order office that indicated that a train (or at least a train in that direction) had to pick up orders at that station. Depending on the type of orders and when they were ready to be delivered, the train might have to stop and get them or the train might be able to pick them up "on the fly". The train order operator would hand up the orders to the train crew while they train went by the station without stopping. Train order signals were normally a different shape or color than block signals. When radios became common place, when communication became near universal and direct between the dispatcher and crews, the need for an intermediary (train order operator) to relay the instructions went away and train orders were replaced with more flexible systems (track warrants, etc.). Plus by then CTC, signal systems that authorized the movement of trains became more commonplace. When I left the UP about 5 years ago, about half the route miles were CTC, about a quarter were track warrants with block signals and the rest were track warrants with no block signals, yard limits or other forms of authority.

Looks good!

In most semaphore train order boards the post is in line with the train order office since the linkage that operated the blades was mechanical operated by the train order operator. Rather than being out in the parking lot, the mast would be in front of the TO office in the depot. The train order signals also varied by railroad by how many colors were used and whether they were normally at stop or normally at clear.