(Steam) Locomotive servicing terminal

[Martijn Meerts]

Apart from the already mentioned Ghibli and Tokyo Station modules, another one I've been more or less actively planning is a servicing terminal for mainly steam locomotives. The general idea is that it's located alongside a main line, and the general theme of the terminal is to make it like a museum, but also still have active usage of turntable and all the spurs etc. Generally, this means lots of fences and warning signs telling people where they can't go etc.

 

The whole thing will be 2 modules of 112x70cm each. Following is the initial track plan:

 

 

 

- Light green tracks are shinkansen lines.

- The 2 grey tracks above the shinkansen lines are a regular mainline.

- The yellow track is reserved for a work/emergency/repair train.

- The brown tracks are inside a roundhouse.

- The orange tracks are washing installations for (passenger) cars.

- The blue tracks are covered by a double shed, meant for passenger car maintenance.

- The dark green tracks are storage tracks for passenger cars. 1 or more shunting locomotives will prepare the cars, and a locomotive can pick them up from those tracks.

 

 

Not too sure about the track plan, it's maybe a bit too crowded, especially with those dark green tracks. On the other hand, these modules are meant to have lots of playing/operating...

 

Comments as always welcome ;)

[marknewton]

Interesting trackplan, Martijn, but it's perhaps not the most workable arrangement. The only access to the carriage shed and wash plant is either via the roundhouse arrival/departure roads, or the carriage storage tracks, blocking them if you want to use them at the same time. The yard tracks to the left of the double slip turnouts are probably too short to be really usable. A steam shed would at the minimum have an ashpit and a coaling plant of some sort.

 

If you don't mind, I'd like to redraw your plan and makes some changes that I reckon would make it more usable. If you're happy for me to do that I'll post the results here in a couple of days.

 

All the best,

 

Mark.

[Martijn Meerts]

Feel free to play around with it, that's why I posted it in the first place :) I wasn't all that happy with the plan in the first place. I'd like to have more roundhouses really, at least 1 more for a total of 3 roundhouses of 3 tracks each, but as they are modules, they need to stick to a certain size as well as hold a few essential lines (even though I'm not sticking to some existing module convention, none of the existing ones worked for me). It's also really my first attempt at building modules, I'm used to static layouts, so I'm probably making every known (and probably unknown) module building mistake ;)

 

As for those tracks left of the double slips, those are actually 28cm at least, and were really only meant to store some (old, unused) locomotives as well as old cars and such.

 

The thing is that the service terminal isn't just a working terminal, but also a museum. So it's no problem having a few short tracks that can only hold 1 or 2 locomotive.

[Bernard]

Martijn & Mark - Do you think we should have a category for track plans? This might be easy for you to access as a track plan develops. What do you think?

[Martijn Meerts]

Bernard, I don't think it's necessary for discussing the occasional track plan as such, but it would be a good idea to have all track plans in one spot, so we can look back at them without having to spend lots of time to search through the forum.

[Martijn Meerts]

I was looking a bit at my servicing terminal again, trying to find prototypical examples of Japanese turntables and roundhouses. I came across the Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum, and of course has to go find it in Google Maps.

 

The nice thing is that I mainly want to model a museum as well, so it won't see heavy traffic. With that in mind, my modules don't need a large coaling station etc. etc. From what I can gather, the Umekoji museum has combined the ashpit, coaling station, and watering station all on 1 small sidetrack. I think maybe that'd be a good idea for my modules as well, although I may double it up so 2 steamers cab be serviced at once.

 

Here's a link to a video of operations at Umekoji, showing off the turntable etc:

(HQ version recommended ;)) Around 4:45 you can see the "service track", although only in the distance. There's a blue container which contains coal, and a bit further a blue pipe which I believe is for water.

 

And here's a link to the museum on Google Maps, quite good quality and should be a nice source of inspiration ;) http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&ie=UTF8&t=k&ll=34.98657,135.743499&spn=0.000712,0.001655&z=20