Thanks to Justin Schlottman for writing, “Hi Lance,
I wanted to share something in regards to your article about the main line having a car dropped to be unloaded. The East Penn Rail Road ( Former Norther Lancaster Railroad) has a customer where the unloading occurs on the main line as well. It’s a feed mill in Stevens, PA. Stevens Feed Mill Inc. The unloading pit is right on the main line. I’m not sure if they receive rail cars anymore but after seeing your article figured it may be worth pointing out”.
OMNI Transload in Miami’s Commerce Park Industrial zone next to the airport (several hundred yards west of runway 8R). Although it’s one structure, it’s broken down into individual spaces, each leased to a different tenant. In effect, each of those cars serves a different customer.(Thanks to “Mr. Miami”, Tolga Erbora for bringing this operation to my attention.)
Yesterday is gone. The wonder of the 1950s is now seven decades in the past. Let’s shed one last tear, stop staring in the rearview mirror, look at the road in front of us, and open our eyes to the amazing modeling opportunities modern railroading is presenting to us. From a design standpoint, we are decades overdue in terms of taking the time-worn, horrid, bowls of spaghetti of the past and putting them where they belong, in the memory book.
The diagram above shows the evolution of how railroads serve smaller customers. In earlier eras, small customers usually had their own spur. They now lease space in a logistics warehouse or send a truck to a team track to unload their product. From a modeling standpoint the “modern system” is easier to represent and allows you to insert more customers in a smaller amount of space.
If you asked most modelers if the number of rail-served industries has decreased, the overwhelming majority would say yes. That’s partly true but, if you look beneath the surface, a more accurate assessment would be that of change. Without question, the number of industries with their own spur has greatly diminished. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve stopped getting rail service. In simple terms, what’s happened is that the railroads have said, let’s strike a middle ground here where we both benefit. We’ll still give you rail service. For it to work, we need to trim the infrastructure of those spider web spurs. If you will come to us, or a central location, you can still ship by rail. The nature of these smaller rail-served industries has changed, but the volume hasn’t decreased as much as you might think. And, therein lies an opportunity. Whether it fits for you will depend on how critical the old “building with a spur” in front is to you. What we have now is a system of team tracks, logistics warehouses, logistics compounds, and transload facilities.
Team track spurs often have a fairly generous length. This means they can serve a number of customers at once. Looking at the spur above, it’s clear that cars for two distinct customers are on the lead. On a different day, you’d also see centerbeams of lumber or hoppers of plastic pellets. Note that in modern times they’ve largely gotten away from loading platforms. Trucks just pull up next to the cars.
Here’s an aerial view of OMNI Transload in Commerce Park with an adjacent team track. On this day the team track had two tank cars and two scrap gons.
Logistics warehouses are the perfect industry for a model railroad. You get a lot of industries in a small amount of space. Common business renting space in them includes: lumber, frozen food, wine, and dry goods. They offer a lot of operational interest as well since an incoming cut of cars needs to be sorted and spotted in front of the correct customers.
The above design addresses today’s world, a world of efficiency. We only need two turnouts to serve what amounts to eight customers, six at OMNI and two on the team track spur. Operations are challenging, both in real life and for the modeler. Incoming cars need to be sorted correctly before spotting. The prototype would either do this in the yard ahead of time or use the “main” as a sorting track. Then, there’s the issue of the ever-present “problem” customer that GM’s complain about. The one that takes FOREVER to unload their car. Your train comes in with new cars but there’s always that one car in front of the warehouse that hasn’t been unloaded. This means you need to pull it, spot the incoming cars, and then put the problem customer’s car back.
A layout like this checks a lot of boxes:
-Plausible
-Operationally interesting
-Visually interesting
-Inexpensive and easy to build
It offers access to the hobby for anybody ranging from a motivated young student, a busy young person launching their career and starting a family, to a diehard “gray haired” prototype modeler like myself.
Let’s stop bitching about what once was and embrace the fascinating rail world that lies before us.
Looking east down 22nd Street on the layout. The “39” on the fascia is a milepost. The red dot on the 17th Avenue label means that it’s a street that can’t be blocked by trains. You’re looking east down 22nd Street in Miami.
A view westward down 22nd Street from 13th Avenue. Peaceful. Optimistic. Unique from an architectural, surface texture, and color standpoint. Numerous visits have given me a sense of its essence, what makes it what it is. If I could successfully capture that in model form, I’d feel like I was “there” whenever I walked into the layout room. I feel that I’ve hit the target. It only took 15 years but I eventually got there. I’ll often just walk into the layout room to give myself a brief 15-minute vacation to Miami.
It’s been written that the most difficult human endeavor is deep thought. I’ll add self-awareness as close second. You can’t design a fulfilling model railroad if you don’t know what you want it to do for you. It sounds easy enough. Personally I don’t think it is. Making it more difficult is that our interests shift back and forth over the years. People immediately jump to track plan sketches simply because it’s easy and fun. We skip conceptual planning because a) we don’t understand its order in the hierarchy (plan first. design second) b) we don’t grasp its importance and c) introspection is a lot harder than sketching.
As for myself, I’ve come to the point where my overarching goal is that when I walk into my layout room I want to feel like I’m in a place that elicits positive thoughts. Miami, LA, Brooklyn, Baltimore? So many positive memories and hopefully more to come.
Next in line as for what the layout’s “job” is? I enjoy the building process. My ratio of build vs. ops time is probably 50:1
Finally, I do like operations and wouldn’t want a layout that didn’t support that. Here’s a vital metric we all need to dial in. What’s your hourly number? How long do you want your sessions to last? If it’s thirty to forty-five minutes why put so much effort into shoehorning in enough spurs to support a six-hour session? Only needing to be entertained for less than an hour takes a lot of design pressure off. Somewhat related is how often you plan to have guests over for sessions and how long those sessions will be. Again, for most of us, we don’t have formal sessions that often. When you do host others, believe me, your guests will privately thank you if those sessions don’t go beyond two hours. One hour to socialize before. two hours running. Dinner/socializing after. If you’ve judiciously chosen your industries, it doesn’t take many spurs to keep your visitors going for those two hours.
This week I finished the 22nd Street corridor shelf run. It’s 17′ 6″ long and only has two industries, Pan Am and Miami Waste Paper. Furthermore, each of those two industries only got a car every year or so. I rarely switch them. I know that other areas of the layout will provide any necessary operational entertainment needs so there wasn’t any need to worry about working spurs into this section. I was free to use the entire run as negative space and a platform to establish the “essence of place”.
It’s common for a modeler to study a prototype and sub-consciously resort to “scanning for spurs”. Look for the spurs. Found them. Delete everything else (top diagram). However, it’s the “everything else” that contributes the majority of a place’s overall look. Take a breath, and allow ample space for industries that are no longer rail-served. You’ll have enough to be very satisfied. You won’t be bored. I promise.
It’s a milestone of sorts, the last major structure on The Downtown Spur, 2201 17th Avenue, is now a wrap. Although building the structure itself was fairly straightforward, the surrounding scratch-built palms, and back parking lot took some time.
Here’s the back parking lot. The biggest challenge was finding a finely detailed wrought iron fence. BLMA made a great one but those are gone for good. Ultimately I figured out a fairly challenging and tricky way to weave together a series of Tichy security bars. The dumpsters were made from photos.
I still have some bare spots on the layout and smaller projects but, at this point, the big stuff is now done. Fifteen years in the making, where does the time go?
