RPRC Safeway Yard - Modeler's Notes

Safeway Yard lies between the 23rd Street Yard and Stege Wye on the Richmond Pacific. It is a stub-ended yard used mainly for car storage. It has two long tracks and a shorter one.

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The RPRC timetable designates the tracks in this location as 701-705 with 701 as the north-most track. 701 is used for set out cars for the BNSF, 702 is the RPRC Harbour Lead which extends from BNSF Jct near the Sims plant on Cutting Blvd to Stege Wye east of this location. Tracks 703-705 are known as Safeway yard.

The below is of Safeway Yard, looking west toward 23rd Street Yard.

clixk for larger viewTrack 701 is on the right with the red box car on it. The open track is 702 and the two tracks holding tank cars are 703 and 704. 705 branches from 704 about level with the 4th tank car on 704.  705 is used when yard is full. The spur curving to the right in the foreground is track 706.  Notice the small switchstand on the switch to track 703 between the two tracks.

The string of new tank cars in the yard is a little unusual. They are newly made cars with an almost sequential set of numbers. Tank cars look more typically like the ones on 704 - a little faded but generally clean apart from some spill marks around the middle of the car. There is usually little graffiti on the tank cars mainly because the flatter vertical surfaces tend to be preferred by taggers.

The two sidings (703 and 704) both leave the main (702) rather than connect to the main via a single lead.

Track 706 curves off to the right to serve the Safeway plant. Here’s another view.

click for larger viewAll spurs in this area pass through a gate of some kind into the plant where the cars are to be delivered. For the most part, the local crew switches into the plants that have a rail connection. The main exception is the Sims plant which has a few spurs and their own switcher to bring cars in and out of their complex.

As seen in the view below, the switches around Safeway Yard are mostly without guard rails. Frogs usually have raised guards in their place and many switches have guards adjacent to the swich points clamped to the outside of the stock rail. One can be just seen on the shiny rails of the Harbour Lead in th epicture above.

Note the rusted railtops on the diverging route into the safeway plant as this spur is no longer in use.  The spur used to receive tank cars when line was switched by the Santa Fe in early 2000’s . It was fun to see the UP and the BNSF working the same line to reach different industries in this area before the Parr Terminal was formed. The Parr Terminal later became the Richmond Pacific RR.

click for larger viewThere’s a pronounced dip on Harbour Lead at this location as well as a mild curve to the right. The tracks are rated at 10mph so this is neither a problem nor worth spending a lot of money to rectify.

The non-flat profile of secondary track is a dilema for model railroaders. It would be easy to model no doubt, but operationally, the peaks and dips cause headaches as freight cars will roll when left on the resulting inclines. In the shot below, it is apparent that any cars on the lead or on the sidings need brakes applied to prevent roll-aways.

click for larger viewThe rails are a pleasing red brown color here. The ballast is quite fine, a mixture of greys and beige and there are several spills of different colored materials. In the last thirteen years, I can’t recall any re-ballasting occuring on these tracks. The ties are close to burried though many are visible. Here’s a view of ballast on the Harbour Lead.

click for larger viewIn the view above, Safewaysiding is on the right. This siding is the interchange with BNSF and holds about 25 cars when full.  Cars for the BNSF are pulled from 23rd street yard about a half mile in the distance into the far end of Safeway Siding. In the morning, an engine and caboose pull the BNSF cars east out of the 23rd Street Yard and enter Safeway Siding on the right. The crew pulls the cars into the siding and cut off when the west switch is cleared. The locomotive and caboose continue to this end of 701 and uses a crossover behind our position to get back onto the Harbour Lead and return to 23rd street yard.

click for larger imageLooking east, we see two crossovers, one in the foreground and the other on the other side of 34th Street. Stege Wye is a quarter mile around the corner to the left. The two tracks that continue around the corner form the north and south legs of the wye so the far crossover is actually the point where the wye ends. The BNSF will occasionally send sets of light engines up from Oakland to this wye to turn them. The units swing around the wye to this point as part of the move.

There’s lots of modeling interest here at the east end of Safeway yard, a seemingly simple ordinary set of tracks. Eevn though there’s only a few tracks here, there’s plenty of detail to be translated into model form.

- Coxy