yards

Edavillenut

Member
i am working on a plan for a 135' ho scale turntable withe round house. what else would i have to put in to make it look more like a steam yard. i have a water tower and colaing tower but dont know where to put them also i am going to build a ash pit and sand tower but again i dont know how to arrange it to make it look real. andy photos or drawings of one of your would reall help.
 

billk

Active Member
Here is a posting from somewhere that I saved a while back, maybe it will help:

This is one area where almost everyone has to make compromises. A full servicing facility just takes up too much space. The "typical" inbound prototype sequence of events (for steam) was:

1) Dump ashes
2) Wash down
3) Inspect
4) Refuel (oil, coal, sand, water)
5) Turn and send back out or store.

In the real world, engines were refueled immediately after inspection (unless they needed extensive maintenance) before they were put away, so they would be ready to go on a moments notice. Assuming, that is, that the prototype had the real estate -- many suffered the same lack of space that we do.

If you have both an inbound and outbound lead, then refueling could be moved to the outbound track. If you have only one lead, it really does not make much difference, since you can skip steps depending upon inbound or outbound.

On my layout I wanted to get the inbound activities as close as possible to prototype, so I have ash pit, wash platform, inspection pit (all from Diamond Scale) all on the inbound lead. However, this takes up a whopping 36" before the turntable in HO, so it really eats the space.
 

jon-monon

Active Member
I have a really nice photo of a roundhouse in action: Go to my website, click where it says "Click here for yesterdays front page" then click " thumbnail pod archive"

The thumnails enlarge when clicked.

You will see a thumbnail of the round house. Below it is a color thumbnail of the engine shop that you see behind the roundhouse in the B/W pic. Also, notice the box car thumbnail? It's a blowup of part of the roundhouse. If you see a particular area of the photo, I can do the same. If there's enough interest, maybe I should work on a thumnail page of just the roundhouse; a bunch of individual blow-ups?

jon
 
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