I put together my yard. This is the support yard for the industrial park/cluster of customers that my branch line serves.
The yard is off of the mainline and functions as an end of line terminal so to speak. In other words freight comes to and goes out of the yard, but nothing really goes through the yard it's not a classificationyard by any means.
So the way it works from the operating departments point of view is road trains pick up and set out cars. The yard job that works the yard and the industries on the branch line takes the cars and sets them onto tracks for the most part every track in the yard is assigned to an industry for the most part. Only have so much room so some industries have to share tracks.
The tracks are as follows:
Yard Track 1-Mrs. Smiths Frozen Foods
Yard Track 2-Ford Motor Company Stamping or Mega Pizza
Ford has there own yard at the plant so sometimes the freight comes in and is taken right out to the plant and shoved onto the siding at Ford yard, if the inbound track at Ford yard is full. The Ford plant actually has a switch engine and crew based there 24-5, because during the week the plant is a 24 hour operation. They do stampings for the Ford Taurus and other cars/trucks and because of the just in time delivery nature of the automotive industry steel shipments come in over the night and are shuttled from the yard to the autoplant by the yard job and delivered to the inbound track at the yard. Then if there are anyout bounds to pull out they are taken away usually empty steel cars. The switch crew at the Ford plant starts bringing steel coil cars in for unloading the plant can take 2 cars at a time. Usually they do 4 steel cars a day. There are also scrap gondollas to switch. Once all the steel is unloaded the steel cars are set out on the outbound track and the yard job that handles the yard and the other industries usually comes to pick the steel cars up and clear the outbound track at the Ford plant and takes the empty seel cars back to the yard where they are called for to be picked up. Usually dispatch/operations gets them on the first higher priority mixed freight road train passing by they can that's going in the right direction so the steel cars can get back to there home railroad and the steel plant.
Then Autoparts hauling box cars come in (usually we have some on hand) and we have tested this the industrial branch line can accomodate and handle an SD50 Locomotive so what operations likes to do with the autoparts is we allow and the other railroads do pay us for this, but the business agreement is Conrail owns the line and the yard that the plant is on. However, because we all participate in the business certain shipments go to certain plants and those railroads also provide there cars. The railroads that participate in the business are
Conrail-Dearborn & Chicago Plants
Santa Fe-Kansas City Assembly Plant
Norfolk and Western-Norfolk Assembly Plant (F-Serries Trucks)
Chessie System - Louisville Truck Plant through there L&N affiliate (Heavy Trucks)
Wayne, Michigan On Chessie System
So anyhow Chessie system was nice enough because they are participating in the business to run a test train for us we don't have the motive power like we need to right now on Conrail, but Chessie does have some locomotives we currently at Conrail do not have, so they ran a big SD50 down through our switches onto our branch line and right into Ford yard and we learned that we could get big road trains in and out of Ford yard, so when it comes to just intime movements of parts trains, some of the trains are dedicated runs so road trains coming from assembly plants will be due in on certain days, so if N&W is picking up on Wednesday there train arrives sometime on Tuesday usually very late evening, the cars are brought in and loaded and the train is assembled and billed, then N&W calls in a new crew and can pick up there train straight from the Ford plant and head right out through our branch onto the mainline and get the train out over the road, and to the assembly plant the next day, they pay Conrail a fee to send there crew and locomotives down, but it cuts down on switching and is a competitive measure the railroads have taken in order to get and keep this pretty profitable business and keep Ford using the railroads for parts movements instead of switching to truck freight, plus Conrail thought it was just easier to bring road trains straight to the auto plant instead of switching and clogging up the yard crew all the time which also has other industries to deal with which are mostly perishable goods frozen foods and fresh foods, so the yard job is always busy with those customers.
Anyhow long winded, but that's railroad operations for now. Still having some kinks to work out of the yard, but over all pretty happy.
Anyhow that's a
Yard Track 3-Calico's Creamery
Yard Track 4-Snyder of Berlin Central City Plant
Yard Track 5-Is shared between Conrail Trans-Loading & Sun Valley Food Service.
On the weekends depending if were all caught up or not and depending if anyone industry is running or not, the road trains drop off cars all day and night, there's usually not to many weekend pick ups, but it could be.
So the yard master calls dispatch and says I have these outbound cars to get out today. Dispatch then tells the yard master when to set out each car or cut of cars and those road trains are then given orders to pick up the outbound freight.
