Coxy's N Scale and Railroad Blog

The latest version of the RBL plan is posted in the 3rd Plan It folder. Feel free to download it and operate the plan.

Includes functional interchange with UP, minor revisions to BNSF Jct at Marina Yard, updated BNSF Oakalnd trackage (lower level), updated Warm Springs trackage near lower level Richmond Staging.

Enjoy.

- Coxy

Modeling Notes

From a modeling perspective, all four interchange tracks are included in my plans for the RBL. Freight car exchange can be easily simulated using the standard 4-cycle waybill methods which cause cars to be delivered to the interchange track, switched to the destination industry (in my case by the Richmond Belt Line) then are returned to the original Class I railroad interchange by the RBL shortline.

Here’s what I have in mind for each one.

BNSF/RBL Interchange

The delivery of cars from the BNSF to the RBL occurs when a local move from staging arrives from lower level staging on the BNSF Siberia Lead found at the back of Marina Yard near the wall with pink ballast. The BNSF local places cars for the RBL in whichever track has been designated by the RBL.  This track assignment could be handled by local RBL crews or by a designated operations manager for the RBL depending on the number of people at the operations session. For the most part, it will be the yard track closest to the BNSF tracks. That yard track is long enough to hold about 22 fifty-foot cars.

Cars bound for the BNSF on the other hand will be dropped by RBL crews in the BNSF track adjacent to the Siberia Lead. This track is double ended so it can be loaded from the end closest to the yard throat and cleared on the other end by whichever BNSF power is collecting those cars. In this way, the cars are “facing” the way they need to go to BNSF Richmond (staging). This is similar to the set up for BNSF cars set out for the BNSF by the Richmond Pacific and makes for very simple pickup move by the BNSF with no runaround move required.

UP/RBL Interchange

Recall that on the prototype, UP drops cars on the Waterside track near the Stege Wye, while the Richmond Pacific drops cars for the UP on the Waterside Track near Central Avenue. The MRVOA backs cars into the drop off point and the MOARV also has a simple trailing point pickup to make.

I recently redesigned the tracks representing the UP so that instead of the UP tracks dead ending at the wall, the plan now allows for live operation on the double track UP main with prototypic connections to two interchange tracks.  Here’s a view of the plan.

The drawing is a little busy so let’s look at the various tracks to see how they function. The UP tracks are in dark grey ballast at the bottom of the plan. They punch through the wall (horizontal light grey rectangle) from staging under the layout in the railroad room and pass into the rest of the garage at the lower right of the plan (in pink ballast at that point).  The UP tracks curve back toward the wall. The double track divides into two double-track mains which connect to each other on the lower left of the plan as a double track return loop.

This configuration is kind of neat. The way it works, a train coming up from staging running right-handed will pass through the 2-track to 4-track junction go around the loop and return through the junction still right hand running. It will do this no matter which way it branches where the double track splits into two double tracks.  The same is true for trains running left handed out of staging.

The 2-track-to-4-track junction provides the option of running any UP train from staging (i.e. the MOARV or the MRVOA) and sending it eastbound or westbound through the interchange junction which is loosely based on the double crossovers at Stege. More on that junction in a moment.

With me so far? Hopefully, yes!

Basically, the UP tracks are a means of providing eastbound and westbound mainline trains to the short interchange junction with the RBL.  The UP trains all start and end at staging and have a very brief appearance in the scenicked portion of the railroad at the interchange junction located inside the railroad room. Importantly, the UP tracks which are located in the garage proper take up a minimum of space. The loops at either end will be removable when not in operation and are each a bit smaller than the FremoN modules I am currently building - see, there is method to my madness!! The FremoN modules will provide all the necessary experience with temporary connections.

Okay, with a means of getting UP trains to the interchange, lets look at the pickup and drop-off scenarios.  Here’s a closer view of the UP interchange junction.

Again, the UP tracks are in the darker grey color and the other tracks are RBL. (The wide dark grey lines at the left of the plan are actually roads which you’ll see in the 3D renderings.)  You’ll see another light grey horizontal rectangle on the plan representing the other part of the internal wall. This is a key aspect of the design. The wall is in two sections offset by about 6 inches from each other with a gap between the ends.

 The UP interchange junction is inside the layout room, while most of the UP track, including the return loop and the 2-4 junction, is outside of the layout room. The nice thing about this approach is that the “behind-the-scenes” parts of the UP operation are actually easily accessible from the garage. Being out of the modeled realm, I can justify the highly functional but totally unprototypic return loop or 2-4 junction without any need to dream up ways to disguise them were they to be located inside the layout room.

Here’s the UP interchange junction itself.

The interchange with the UP is loosely based on the tracks at Stege crossovers and incorporates some aspects of the wye as well. The bias is toward functionality rather than faithful representation of the prototype tracks at those locations. I’m striving for realistic operation as seen from the layout room and that is accomplished quite well by this plan with a very modest amount of space dedicated to the interchange.

The UP tracks have two crossovers and there are two crossovers connecting the UP main to the adjacent RBL track. This RBL track simulates the Waterside Drill track which runs beside the UP double track main on the prototype.  There is also a spur to the Safeway plant (not shown in the plan above but present in the 3D renderings below.) This spur will add an interesting job for RBL crews or create a very simple UP Oakland local assignment.

Oakland is to the left of the plan, while Roseville is to the right. The UP drops off cars for the RBL on the Waterside track on the Roseville end of the junction (the right side). No cars are seen on the plan above. The waterside track runs along the garage side of the wall and can hold 23 cars.  The MRVOA will arrive from right to left and will back cars for the RBL through the crossovers onto the waterside track. The MRVOA operator(s) will be able to stand in the garage area to watch the backup move while dropping off the cars for the RBL. The cut of cars is left with just the first car or two visible from inside the layout room making the RBL pickup easy from inside the room with little worry about backing in blind to collect the cars come off the waterside track.

After dropping off the cars for the RBL, the UP train from Roseville then continues toward Oakland (to the left) and disappears from the layout room through a punchthrough in the wall (hence the roads in the corner to disguise the hole in the wall). It heads around the return loop and the 2-4 junction and back to staging.

Let’s take a look at this aspect of UP interchange. Below we can see the MRVOA coming up from staging and taking the junction to enter the layout from the “Roseville end”.  This is seen from the garage space. It is running on the right hand main and takes the branch that allows trains to pass into the layout room through the gap between the wall sections.

Below we see the MRVOA entering the layout space “from Roseville” and it will pass through the representation of the crossovers at Stege before making the backup move onto the Waterside track. I would expect this junction to be the main signalling example on this layout.

Here you can see the MRVOA making it’s set out of cars for the RBL onto the Waterside track.

Later in the session, or even next session, the RBL switcher collects the cars set out by the UP, and a new collection of switching assignments arrive on the Richmond Belt Line layout.

Now let’s take a look at how the UP gets its cars back from the RBL.  Ideally, I would have liked to continue the Waterside track beside the UP main towards Oakland and have the RBL set out cars for the UP there, just like the prototype. However, space is limited in this corner and I would need about 12 feet of track to hold 23 cars. More importantly, cars may sit on the interchange tracks between sessions so the interchange track needs to be permanent. Looking toward Oakland at the interchange reveals why the prototype can’t be followed here.

The UP tracks bend around to the left and punch through the wall to the garage space and the tracks on the other side of the wall are only in place during operations. So instead of using the Waterside track, I opted for creating a two track yard to hold cars for the UP. In the view below the interchange yard is seen curving to the right, away from the UP crossovers.

This two track yard comfortably holds 23 cars for the UP. It has no prototype representation but in the scheme of things it will work well and can readily be built and weathered to make it look like interchange has always been handled using these tracks.

Let’s take a look at the pickup routine for the Union Pacific.

This time, a train from Oakland does the collection, so the MOARV comes up from lower level staging and takes the “Oakland branch” at the 2-4 junction.

After rounding the big reverse loop in the garage space, operators in teh layout space will see the MOARV glide out from under the freeway overpass “from Oakland” and pass through the double crossovers.

It then backs through the crossovers and onto RBL tracks to collect the cars in the RBL interchange yard.

After collecting all the cars bound for the UP, the MOARV continues in the direction of Roseville, exiting the railroad space and soon rejoining the double track to staging as in the rendering below.

In this view from the garage space, we are looking back to the interchange junction which is found in the layout space just on the other side of the gap in the wall sections. The Waterside track is seen just above the units. It has a couple of curves in it to add a little length and increase it’s capacity by an extra car or two. The blue rectangle at the gap between th two wall sections is a simple sky-board to prevent operators in the layout space being distracted by activities in the garage space.

Notice also that the permanent tracks here (the ones flat against the wall) are covered by acrylic. This protects the track and cars left standing between sessions from dust or other disturbance such as kids and particularly the felines that frequent the garage area.

Design leads to a wall

The design of this section of the layout has been unusually painstaking to ensure that it can be built and to ensure that the interchange operations will function smoothly during operations sessions. I’m satisfied that the design will work having operated the 3D layout extensively.

What this now allows me to do is begin construction of the wall sections in the garage knowing where tracks will pass through knowing that the positioning and dimensions of the wall sections are compatible with the design. I’m also glad of he FremoN experiment which will validate a lot of connectivity assumptions for the temporary track sections well before the RBL is constructed. This is important as the design depends on those temporary sections being very reliable.

- Coxy

Key to shortline operations is interchange of freightcars with larger railroads. The Richmond Pacific RR interchanges with the following lines:

• Union Pacific at Stege
• BNSF at 23rd Street Yard and Safeway siding

The RPRC also interchanges on a much more restricted basis with

• The Chevron Refinery railroad (WRSI) near the Richmond Parkway
• Sims Metals at Sims Jct (this one is a stretch, but operationally it functions as an interchange)

These interchanges breath life into the Richmond Pacific. Each day the interchange railroads set out cars for collection by the RPRC. Likewise, each day, the RPRC sets out cars to be returned/delivered to the other railroad at the designated location. On average, the number of cars exchanged in and out tend to balance as far as each connecting railroad is concerned. Cars arrive at the RPRC, are delivered to the destination industry and are returned to the road that exchanged the car for the return journey. The rough numbers of cars are as follows based on my observations:

• BNSF ~20 cars/day
• UP ~20 cars/day
• WRSI - not sure, probably about 10-15
• Sims Metal - not sure, probably about 10-20 cars a month

To the best of my knowledge, cars do not arrive from the UP and get returned to the BNSF or vice versa. There are of course many instances where cars arrive from the larger railroad and are then exchanged with the smaller connection such as the WRSI.

Interchange Schedules and Volume

The interchange schedules tend to stay the same for an extended period, especially for interchanges with the larger railroads. This allows both railroads to plan their operations such that interchange tracks are cleared when they are full and filled when they are empty. (The reverse tends to cause headaches for the railroads or interest for the railfan, depending on your perspective!).  Interchange with the smaller entities will be more driven by demand. The RPRC swaps cars with its larger connections 5-6 days a week.

So looking at the numbers above, the RPRC probably exchanges up to about 40 cars a day, at least five days a week. In other words up to about 200 cars a week or I would estimate around 8,000 - 10,000 cars a year.

BNSF Interchange

The BNSF interchange has found it’s way into lots of previous posts, so I won’t rehash the details here. More recently though, it is worth noting that BNSF has changed it’s interchange routine.

The BNSF Richmond Terminal has recently received a half dozen environmentally friendly and fuel-conservative genset switchers. These functional, but rather unattractive, units are quickly supplanting older four axle units employed in local service such as GP30’s, GP35’s, GP50’s and even GP60Ms, many of the second generation units still operating in the attractive blue and yellow scheme. Mark my words here, get your pics of the older units while you can!!!

Lately, we are seeing the BNSF Oakland Local do some collection from Safeway siding on it’s return trip but the local is now operating much later in the day, leaving Richmond around 4:00pm and returning from Oakland around midnight. The RPRC-BNSF interchange is now also being picked up in the evening by a single genset unit that makes the short trip from the BNSF Richmond Terminal over to BNSF Jct on the RPRC and often brings cars to be interchanged to the RPRC. The cars for the RPRC are shoved into which ever 23^rd Street yard track has been designated by the RPRC and cars to be collected by the BNSF are simply pulled from Safeway siding by the genset unit which then heads back to the BNSF Richmond Terminal. I suspect that the BNSF Richmond switcher collects the RPRC cars when it  has time or the Oakland train is running late.

As the BNSF interchange is now happening later in the evening, I have no photos, but I often see the activity as I’m coming home in the evening and the gates go down on Marina Bay Parkway. (Yahoo!)

Here’s a brief clip of the BNSF genset unit coming over from Richmond on the Siberia Lead to do a collection in the daytime. At the time, I was running an errand to Longs and I grabbed the clip for reference purposes so the video and sound quality are less than usual, but better than nothing.

The BNSF Siberia Lead is separated from the RPRC 23^rd Street Yard by ‘All Aboard’ self storage. The BNSF Siberia Lead threads its way along the far side of Meeker Ave then veers right at the self storage buildings and runs behind a group of office buildings before joining the RPRC tracks near Marina Bay Parkway.

Union Pacific’s MAORV/MRVOA

Interchange with the Union Pacific all takes place over near I-580 at Stege. The Union Pacific train MRVOA (Manifest Roseville to Oakland) arrives in Stege around 5:30am on weekdays and shoves cars for the Richmond Pacific north up the Waterside drill track and leaves the cut of cars just north of the switch leading to the wye tracks. The RPRC collects these cars around 9:00am and begins sorting the cars according to destination using the wye and a siding located there.

The same crew shoves the daily cut of cars for the UP south along the Waterside drill track toward CP Stege. The RPRC crew obtains permission from the UP dispatcher who gives the RPRC crew a signal to move through the interlocking on the Waterside Track in order to place the cars for the UP near Central Avenue. The cars are spotted about a hundred yards back from the signal bridge. This allows a power set to move from the interlocking plant fully onto the Waterside track before making a joint with the waiting cars.

Around 6:00am the next morning, the UP MOARV train (Manifest Oakland to Roseville) shows up from Oakland and collects the waiting interchange cut at Central Ave before continuing on to Roseville. I have frequently seen this train backed fully onto the Waterside track south of the interlocking plant and clear of both busy mains waiting for a gap in the action.

When I am out on the walking trails not far from Stege Jct early in the morning, about half the time I see one or other of the UP trains dropping off or collecting cars.

UP Schedules

It is worth noting that for several years, the routine for the UP was also different. The MOARV used to collect cars from Central Ave in the evening around 8:00pm and continue on to Roseville without much fuss. Both mains are less busy at that time of day. The counterpart MRVOA would drop cars on the Waterside drill track near Stege Wye between 12:00am and 3:00am and continue on to Oakland. Same deal, not much mainline traffic to hold it up.

It is not apparent to me why the UP changed schedules though there were likely reasons behind the decision. What is interesting to me is that the MOARV is often backed completely onto the Waterside track with the entire train spread  around the curve at Albany as I pass it on my way to work around 7:45 and on occasion, I have seen it as late as 9:00am. The MOARV is now a lot more vulnerable to the heavier morning traffic on this line and has to wait it’s turn. When this happens, the RPRC has to wait it’s turn too. Good for railfans, bad for rail crews.

MOARV marking time

On Saturday, I saw the MOARV arrive in the morning and it was still there later in the day, perhaps delayed by trackwork or traffic further along the line. I shot these clips of the train from my car at around 4:00pm.

There’s no place to stand, due to the proximity of the tracks to the freeway, so tracking shots like this are pretty much all that’s available.

Here’s the full train. Note the autoracks which are almost always in this train lately. The rear 2/3 of the cars are the setouts from the Richmond Pacific starting from the first black tank car in the consist. This clip serves as an example of the typical makeup of this train at this time.

The cars are not delivered to the UP in any particular order. In fact, the train will be humped at Roseville, so any ordering of cars by the RPRC would be a waste of time.

Both interchanges provide plenty of action and interaction with the two class I’s in this area. There are not so many cars coming on and off the property that it would be difficult to simulate in model form. I have often seen a particular car on the UP setout point on my way to work, say a loaded centerbeam flatcar with lumber for Channel Lumber on Cutting Blvd in Richmond. Later, as I arrive home, I see the same car now waiting in the 23^rd Street yard along with several other cars for the evening switch job. That evenining, as we are coming back from Point Richmond, I see the evening RPRC crew working the lead along Cutting. The loaded centerbeam is sitting at Channel Lumber and the empty is waiting on the  Cutting lead while tank cars are being switched at another industry.

The next day, the centerbeam rolls past me as I wait at the Marina Bay Parkway grade crossing on my way to work. The crew eventually shoves this car and a dozen others down the Waterside drill track to Central Avenue and that evening, as I return from work, the empty centerbeam car is there, almost fully cycled. The next morning, the UP MOARV makes the pickup. If the MOARV comes at the right time, I’ll see the empty centerbeam car from a distance on my morning walk, as it heads to Roseville and on to points north. Driving to work a little later, more often than not, I’ll see that there is another loaded centerbeam among the dozen or so cars at Stege Wye waiting to be collected by the RPRC crew.

Sounds like an operation just begging to be modeled! Dont’you think?!!

- Coxy