Don't worry about the language "barrier" Stein! George Bernard Shaw once said that the English, and the Americans are the same people separated by a common Language!
American english and British english have just enough differences to make it very difficult to understand each other at times!
<Grin> I have always thought that "two nations divided by a common language" was a clever way of putting it
We have a similar situation over here in Scandinavia - three of the five North Germanic languages spoken in this region (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) are so similar that they generally are mutually understandable, if you speak slowly and clearly, despite the occasional misunderstandings due to a few differences in spelling, pronunciation and vocabulary.
E.g. in Swedish "rar" means "sweet" or "cute", while in Norwegian it means "weird". Can cause some misunderstandings when boy meets girl (or boy meets boy, or girl meets girl) - it may make a difference whether the other person finds you weird or cute
Anyways - to get back to the subject at hand - designing a good yard for GearBox.
Mandan yard is a good illustration of how a prototype (real railroad) yard often can be pretty different from a model railroad yard, because there are some significant differences between the real railroad and the model.
The most obvious (and important) is size. Mandan is over a yard long. In N scale, a mile (5280 feet) is 5280/160 = 33 feet long.
Also, our reach is about 24" - stuff more than 24" from the aisle is hard to reach - in a pinch we can reach about 30" into a layout - but it often leads to stuff being closer to the front edge (the fascia) being knocked over or crushed.
Reach and view tends to put a limit on yard depth - how many tracks we put in side by side, and whether we put buildings between the fascia and track - access and view tends to get harder if we have to reach in across buildings with breakable details to get at things on the layout.
Also, since our mainlines tend to be short relative to the length of the yard, and traffic thus tends to arrive at shorter intervals than in real life (at least in a layout run by several operators), it often is more important on a model railroad to not use the main as a switching lead. (Mandan has a switching lead on the east end, but seemingly not on the west end).
So there are some typical designs floating around, based on the premise that you want these things in an efficient small classification yard which has to keep up with traffic on a model railroad:
- Dedicated switching lead (so you can switch without interfering with main)
- Some double ended tracks (for flexibility), some single ended (for capacity)
- Ladder coming out towards the aisle, so you see the clearance points
- Main behind yard (to avoid snagging passing trains with sleeves)
- Engine service tucked in under switching lead (to keep scene less deep)
I.e. something like this:
Referring to the labels on the drawing, the salient points are:
Between points A and B: two Arrival/Departure tracks between points A and B - allows trains to arrive or depart without interfering with ongoing switching.
Incidentally, such tracks do not have to be double ended - you can also e.g. use two single ended tracks, where one track functions as an engine escape track for the other track when traffic is low, and engines just get trapped until the yard switcher can remove their cars (as on David Popp's Waterbury yard):
In this case, a train arriving from the left on the main on the main will have to go past the yard to the right and then back into the yard, while a train heading out towards the left will have to back out onto the main to the right before going left on the main.
Trains arriving from the right on the main will go into the tracks head first. If there is only one train on the A/D (Arrival/Departure) tracks, the newly arrived train from the right cuts off it's engine, pulls forward (to the left) on the A/D track, throw the switches/turnouts and then uses the second A/D track as an escape path for the engine.
Or one can do something like on Woodsriver Yard on Paul Dolkos' old layout - having the yard be on a peninsula, with access via a wye, so train always will back into the A/D tracks, no matter what direction they came from:
One can also use a double slip in a yard to compress things - like where the second A/D track branches off from the first:
Going back to the first sketch - the point labelled as C is the yard switching lead. The switching lead should have access both to the yard body tracks (labelled E in the sketch) and the A/D tracks (between points A and B), and it should be long enough for the switcher to pull out all the cars in one track while switching.
One trick for making the switching lead longer is to connect the far end of the switching lead back to the main - so that if you have to pull a really long cut of cars, you can use the main as part of the switching lead, but to handle normal cuts, you won't have to go out on the main.
Having the switching lead connect back to the main also gives you the option (if both arrival/departure tracks are full) of taking an arriving train in from the main via the switching lead, and putting it directly into one of the body tracks (E), or having a train depart directly from one of the body tracks.
Using the switching lead and yard ladder for an arriving or departing train obviously means that you will have to stop switching
while a train is moving in or out of the body tracks. So your switcher will have to duck into some track to get out of the way while this is happening. But it likely will be a not very frequent happening, given that you have dedicated A/D tracks.
Another game one can play with the yard ladder is that one can increase the length of the body tracks (and thus yard capacity) by using a compound ladder (a tree-like structure, where each branch branches further out):
Compound ladders are not so popular on real railroads (although they exist there too), since compound ladders has a tendency to mean that people will have to walk back and forth across the tracks to throw switches, increasing the odds of someone being run over. With a straight ladder, you can stay on one side of the track while throwing switches.
A lot of design practices and rules on real railroads are "written in blood". When a model railroad car goes down the wrong track or derails, not much happens. When things happen on a 1:1 scale railroad, someone may have to go face someone else's spouse and kids to deliver the worst message in their lives.
But getting back to model railroads. The track labelled G (parallel to the yard ladder) can be used as a runaround, to get the switcher engine on the opposite side of a couple of cars, e.g. if you want to put a caboose at end of a train, and it provides a convenient place to attach various service tracks (labelled H in the sketch) - like ready tracks for engines, a caboose track, a RIP (Repair in Place) track, and places to deliver freight to the yard itself - sand, diesel/coal (depending on era), new wheels, taking out scrap or whatever.
This is a typical "good practice" model railroad layout yard. It is pretty efficient, and gives a lot of options.
What it doesn't necessarily have a lot of is character. It is a pretty generic design.
If you look at Mandan, you will notice that Mandan has several interesting features - like the single ended no 9 track, or the "crooked main" track, the wheel spur, the short yard track and so on and so forth. The yard also is not optimized for lots of switching - instead various tracks are used e.g. for storage of various kinds of cars.
So one can have quite a bit of fun with introducing features which are based on a real prototype somewhere.
Also, a yard does not necessarily have to be an efficient sorting machine. A yard can be any area where you have several tracks and where switching is going on so speeds have to be kept down so you can stop short of anything getting in your way.
Yards comes in many sizes and shapes. The easiest type to model is the small auxiliary yard - an industry yard of some kind - which essentially is not a place to engine service, crew changes, repairs etc, but just a small knot of tracks where a few cars might be dropped off to be picked up later by another train, or where a crew can sort their cars into some order which looks sensible in terms of delivering those cars.
Here is e.g. a pretty nice looking yard (heavily inspired by a design by Robert Beaty) - which e.g. could be the yard of a small short line somewhere:
There are so many ways of designing yards for model railroads that it seems fairly meaningless to talk about "the ultimate" yard.
But I hope this post at least threw up some ideas. You can find more in the books I recommended - they are pretty good.
Smile,
Stein
