RBL Trackplan Features - Richmond Lead
Friday, February 29, 2008 at 5:39PM The Richmond Pacific East Main
The east throat of Richmond Pacific’s 23rd St Yard converges down to a single track just before crossing Marina Bay Parkway, a median-separated, four-lane road that serves the various communities at Marina Bay where I live. About a hundred feet further along the track on the east side of the road is the west switch of Safeway Siding.
In the photo below, the whole of Safeway Siding is shown. If you look closely, you can see three cars set out for the BNSF on the west end of Safeway Siding, one black tank car and and two gondolas carrying scrap from Sims Metal scrap dealers located on Cutting Blvd. A couple of spurs can be seen curving on the north side of the siding to line up with the sides of industrial buildings. The complex on the left is the newly built California Department of Health Sciences labs which has no rail connection while the complex on the right is owned by Safeway, hence the name.
Modeling Features
On the west end of Safeway Siding, a couple of important features are apparent. Referring to the photo below, the tracks have a generous right of way on the south side. Even at the viewing height of the picture (which is well above normal viewing height for N Scale), the ties vary noticeably in color from bleached to dark. There is a three foot high concrete wall on north side of the west end of the siding that was probably some kind of loading apron at some point (I’m guessing). It looks also as if there was once a loading point that curved from the siding near the west switch, a nice feature to model. (incidentally, I have never noticed that loading point while viewing from the ground.)
BNSF Interchange with the RPRC
As documented on other posts, Safeway Siding is where the RPRC sets out cars each morning for the BNSF. The BNSF sends a local six days a week from its Richmond Terminal to Oakland. On it’s return, the BNSF Oakland local collects the cars the RPRC has left for it earlier in the day. Some days there are only a few cars waiting and other days the siding is full to capacity with twenty cars or more. In the pic below, the BNSF is collecting a cut of cars in the afternoon on it’s return to Richmond.
The siding is on a a slight but noticeable down slope, visually interesting and tempting to model but problematic from an operational point of view, especially in N Scale. In the shot above, the cars on the siding and the cars on the main would need to be restrained from rolling down the grade.
I need to check where the BNSF drops off cars for the Richmond Pacific. My understanding is that the BNSF Oakland local shoves cars into a track in the 23rd St Yard on it’s way south in the morning but I have only seen that occurring once or twice.
Modelling the BNSF Interchange
Okay so much for the prototype. I looked long and hard at how to model Safeway Siding and, like the curved yard, couldn’t figure an acceptable way to justify modeling it faithfully. There’s a couple of considerations that get in the way.
I preferred that operators should not have to look over the BNSF cars on the siding in order to switch any adjacent industries served from the main. Ideally then, the siding would be on the wall side of the main.
The cars for the BNSF are set out in the morning and any industrial spurs accessible from the siding track couldn’t be switched till after the cars were collected by the BNSF later in the session. Even after the cars have been collected by the BNSF, more cars can be set out by the RBL.
Serving industries from a siding that is often occupied is not necessarily a show stopper, but there are better operational ways to introduce challenges to switching crews without building in a fundamental limitation into the trackage that would be there every session whether I wanted it or not. This stretch of track is used by BNSF road trains so I want to have flexibility to keep things moving on the layout. A delay because of a complicated switch move could be interesting for sure, but it will likely be at the expense of a train on the roster later in the session.
For a siding that is often holding cars, perhaps the industries at this location would be better accessed from the main? This is a less desirable route for two reasons, the first is that it would be a poor representation of Safeway Siding and if I am to model it, I’d like it to be a representation that reminds me of the various time I have watched trains there.
The second reason is that in this configuration, industries would need to be located toward the front of the layout bench. For efficient use of layout bench, I preferred that industry buildings be located toward the back of the layout bench so they could be represented by a flat rather than a more space-consuming complete structure.
So I couldn’t have it both ways, a siding at the back and industries at the back.
As if that wasn’t enough, here’s where I really got stuck. As much as I want to be able to exchange up to 20 cars with the BNSF during the session, laying out a representation of 23rd Street Yard and of Safeway Siding end to end with about 6-12” of single track in between the two would have resulted in a lot of wall space being taken up. (20 cars = ~8 feet for each of the yard and siding tracks, add at least two feet for the yard ladder switches and half a foot each end for switches on the siding you get a whopping 19 feet of bench space needed. My whole space will be about 19 feet long! An entire side of the room would be devoted to the yard (a necessary feature for the layout) and the BNSF interchange track (nice to have but expensive in terms of linear bench use).
Could it work if I shortened one or both? The answer is no and here’s why.
Importance of Interchange to the RBL
The RBL’s two interchange tracks with the UP and BNSF are very important to the operations of the RBL as they are the entry and exit points of all cars found on the layout. The arrivals and departures of cars at the interchanges will more or less balance over time. When more cars are delivered by the Class I’s than returned by the RBL, the RBL tracks will progressively clog with cars or, if the reverse happens, the layout will eventually become starved of cars. If the interchange tracks are too short, it will generally limit the amount of switching to be done and the amount of fun to be had!
The present trackplan allows for up to 20 BNSF cars and 23 UP cars to be received from and delivered to the RBL each session. Not coincidently, there are enough industries to absorb more than 43 cars, in fact if every industry spot was occupied with freight cars, there’s room for about 70 cars sitting at industries - long sidings are nice!. This tells me that even if the interchange tracks are stuffed with cars each session, only about 2/3 of the cars at layout industries would be cycled and, more typically, a lower percentage of the cars on the layout would be moved in a typical session. I.e. not every industry gets switched every session and that translates to realism and more variety for operators.
This is a good reason for keeping the interchange tracks long.
RBL Richmond Lead
The solution I eventually settled on for the trackage on the east side of Marina Yard was to move the eight foot Safeway Siding west so it is parallel with Marina Yard. In other words, I preserved functionality in the design as the prime factor and elected to go with a freelance representation of the interchange track.
While the configuration in my plan is not laid out like the big guys, it will work just fine and I’m much happier having the means to interchange a lot of cars than I would be squishing the yard length and shortening Safeway Siding to fifteen or even ten cars and keeping the yard and siding end to end. And, as a bonus, I get back about eight feet of wall space on the east side of Marina Yard which now hosts three industries.
Here’s what I got as compensation for merging Safeway Siding and Marina Yard:
The orientation of the above plan is mirror-image flipped relative to the earlier satellite pictures of Safeway Siding. In the plan, east is to the left. (This bothers some people. I don’t get it. I’m looking south, east is left, what’s the big deal?!) Marina Yard east throat is on the right side at the top. The brown and orange buildings are representations of some new office buildings that now stand at the corner of Meeker and Marina Bay Parkway.
The dark grey line crossing the main at an angle is Marina Parkway, only two lanes on my pike. The main passes through the scene toward the back allowing the focus to be on the industries. There are two large building flats at the back, each with it’s own spur. I haven’t decided what these will be yet. One may represent the auto parts Distribution Center on Cutting which is switched by the RPRC and receives nice long autoparts boxcars. The other may be based on a rail-served packaging plant (Graham Packaging) located near Goodrick Ave near Parr Blvd in Richmond. Graham Packaging receives covered hoppers, usually in sets of three and the building would be easy to model.
By placing the factories at the rear of this section of the layout, they can be represented by flats. This is how things look in 3D.
RBL Team Tracks
The concrete colored rectangle at the front of the layout is a representation of the RPRC’s Florida Ave team tracks shown below. The RPRC team track yard shown in the photo below has three tracks and the team track yard is surrounded by a cyclone wire fence on four sides.
In the view below, I’ve represented the Florida Ave team tracks on the Richmond Belt Line with two tracks, one long one at the back and a shorter one with a loading ramp.
By placing the team tracks at the front of the layout bench, I can model various scenes within the team track area based on the type of loading or unloading that is taking place using trucks and cars, loads in transit, the occasional mobile crane. Note also that the cyclone wire fence will only go around three sides on my model, the aisle side will be open. This is to prevent snagging as hands reach in to the area and also to suggest the concrete apron is larger than that modeled.
The ramp track can accommodate two cars while the apron track can hold five fifty-foot cars comfortably. The team track is of course a universal industry justifying a wide range of cars including tank cars, boxcars, flats, covered hoppers, open hoppers, centerbeams, and gondolas and a equivalently wide range of loads.
BNSF Junction
On the Richmond Lead near the left hand end of the team track apron, the BNSF connects with the Richmond Belt Line. The BNSF branches here in order to lose enough elevation to pass under the RBL and the junction with the UP tracks found a quarter of a scale mile further along the Richmond lead. Other than the Siberia Lead connections, there is no local prototype equivalent that the BNSF junction here is based on. I’ll describe this BNSF track in a later post.
Safeway Yard
Toward the east end of Safeway Siding on the Richmond Pacific is Safeway Yard. This yard is single-ended and in earlier times it occupied more of the right of way to the south of Safeway Siding. These days the Richmond Pacific uses Safeway Yard to store cars.
The throat is a little unusual as it has its ladder on the main. Also there is a switch near the last car where the yard goes to three tracks, though in normal use, only the two tracks hold cars. Note, by the way how much the tank cars vary in color.
Regatta Blvd makes a 90 degree turn near the yard throat and a distribution facility. Both Regatta Blvd and the Distribution center building (flat) are represented on the RBL plan pretty much as they are in the photo above.
Safeway Yard on the RBL
Here’s my representation of Safeway Yard. I’ll be using this yard to store cars just like the RPRC. I located the yard “around the corner” in order to have enough space for the sidings which make good use of the space in the back corner of the layout.
The road on the left side of the track is Regatta Blvd and the blue flat is the distribution building. Here’s the 3D rendering:
The road on the right which crosses both the RBL and the BNSF is mainly there to provide visual separation between the Safeway Yard area and the industries near BNSF Jct.
Further along Richmond Lead
Richmond Lead continues past Safeway Yard behind the viewing position in the rendering above and that will be covered in the next post.
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Reader Comments (1)
That's a very good trackplan you got there. It's really important to have deep and keen plans like this in order to have a very good and smooth output.