Reflections on building a yard

Recently, I completed the trackwork of a 5-track classification yard. The yard follows as many of the 10 Commandments of Model Railroad Yard Design as possible, but made some mistakes and have a list of things I'd change if I was to do it over again. This post will address what was done well, and what was done poorly.

Done Well:
* Peco turnouts for local control. There's no confusing ground throws next to adjacent tracks.

This is a problem at the club layout. There is a ladder track and a ladder bypass track with a couple sidings off it. Sometimes someone goes to throw a turnout on the ladder track and accidently throws the one on the bypass track! It's even worse when there's another train on it. One of the advantages to the Peco is the positive snap throw, so no ground throws are necessary. You can't throw the turnout from above with a train on it, and the turnout that you're throwing is guaranteed to be the one you want to move.

* Every piece of rail is soldered to either another piece of rail or a feeder. Save dirty track, there is no reason a locomotive cannot get power.

The recommendation was made on the Wiring for DCC website. Rail joiners are relied upon for alignment only, and not relied upon for power transfer. While a large percentage of the rail joiners installed on a model railroad won't fail, enough do to cause headaches.

Another benefit is due to the sheer number of feeders, the power system is very redundant. Should one feeder fail, there are still several others that are working. (While rare, this does happen.)

* The yard wiring is done logically and documented for work later.

All feeders follow a color code, black goes on the back rail, and the colored wire goes on the front. There are different colors for classification tracks, arrival/depature and escape tracks, and the yard leader. This makes looking at the feeder underneath all one needs to do to figure out what track it goes to.

The wiring has been documented, showing where all the bus wires are and where all the feeders are. The feeders disappear because of the paint, so if there's ever a problem the diagram shows the approximate location.

* Tracks and roadbed were painted, providing a uniform look.

Two different manufacturer's tracks were combined in building the yard. Since they're two different alloys, there's a noticeable difference between them. By painting the track a uniform look was achieved, and it took the yard from being a collection of parallel tracks to a yard. Forget weathering freight cars, weather the ground they stand on!

* The longest track is the Arrival/Departure track.

The arrival/departure track is supposed to be as long as your longest track, so I simply made my longest track the A/D track. There's an escape at the end for power to be cut off, while the switcher begins work on the rear.



Done Poorly:
* Not enough room for tracks.

The yard base was built for the yard plan, but the plan didn't show how little space there actually was between the rail cars. There's only 2-3 scale feet of space between cars on adjacent tracks, way too little. I had used Peco Medium turnouts end-to-end to form my yard ladder, and based my track placement off of that. This means that cars will have to be uncoupled from above, or by using the "delayed uncoupling" feature most knuckle couplers allow.

Should a derailment occur, the derailed car will have to be pulled out to the lead and rerailed, then put back. All the more reason to make sure there's enough room betwen your yard tracks!

* Not enough room for yard buildings.

The benchwork ends shortly after the yard tracks, so there's no room to add yard buildings such as an office or storage sheds. Also, to maximize aisle space, the benchwork follows the yard ladder, leaving little room for scenery details such as vehicle access roads.

* No temporary lead was installed before testing, making movement of cars difficult.

While not a design error, this is a building error. Before painting and ballasting, if a temporary lead track had been installed and some switching attempted, I might have noticed the lack of room between tracks and been able to do something about it. As it was, the tempoary lead was only installed after most the work on the yard was done.

* Built the yard with no wiggle room inside the room itself.

I had to shorten some support girders in order to get it to fit. It would have been better to build the yard in two sections, the yard lead and extending tracks. (This has the added benefit of allowing the yard to be easily extended if space allows.)

I also measured max distance along the floor, and did not account for fixed objects such as window casings or outlets that stick out more than the base moulding. When the time came to install the yard benchwork, it was slightly too long to fit in the room.

* Painted and ballasted the track without coating the top of the rails with some removal agent.

This was a mistake! The paint and glue stuck to the rails and held fast. I tried cleaning it off with a wire wheel on a dremel tool, and that worked only marginally well. Brute force with a track cleaning block didn't work either. What finally worked was applying mineral spirits to the rail heads (sometimes multiple times) and then cleaning off anything that wasn't shiny with a track cleaning block.

* Too much ballast

Ballast is a necessary thing on model railroads, as it tends to keep tracks from moving. When I ballasted the yard, however, I got way too much ballast in the turnouts, and had little pieces of ballast fouling up the whole works. One piece of ballast was hidden in a turnout throw rod and kept the turnout from throwing all the way. It took days to figure that one out; that piece was hidden well.

Undecided:
* Rails were cut near the turnouts and immediately soldered back together in order to provide a point of release if the turnout ever needed to be removed. While this has the desired effect, it's not easy to solder rails together without the use of a rail joiner to keep them aligned.