Working at the Federal Street Yard

By John D'Angelo

Sometimes you can have a lot of fun just shuffling cars around a yard. The Federal Street Freight Yard route has been designed to give hours of entertainment from moving freight cars to and from industries, including a dock area.


Federal Street 2008 track plan.

I originally issued the Federal Street route a number of years ago to the Trainz Download Station (DLS) prior to TRS2004 being released. I had used Mike10’s animated switches for the route, but when TRS2004 was issued Mike’s switches would not work in TRS2004. This was a major bummer. Now there are good reasons for me to reissue the basic idea with a new route. This version of the Federal Street route has been updated to TRS2006 SP1 and does not use any third-party add-ons. If you have TRS2006 SP1, you can just download the Federal Street route at the VR Downloads page and use it.

The route is a shelf styled single baseboard switching layout with a portal east and west of the yard. It can be used as a standalone route or you could join it to a route you have by using the Merge option in Surveyor. I have found that by having mainline traffic move in one direction, from East to West, the AI system works very nicely.

The yard has a two-track engine house for the storage of yard locomotives. In my example for this article I decided to use Long Island Railroad equipment.

I used an SW7 as the switcher working the yard. Mainline traffic is generated by the East portal, with a new train every 15 minutes. A push-pull passenger train will switch over from the mainline to the Federal Street station, load passengers, then continue westward to the West portal. A peddler freight will also be generated by the East portal and will drive to the peddler stop on the mainline, wait there for one minute, then continue to the West portal. During that one minute pause, I will take over command of the peddler freight, set the brakes on the freight load, uncouple the engine from the freight load, move it forward from the load, and then have it continue with the schedule. I then transfer control to the switcher and, once the mainline engine has left, I will couple the switcher to the freight load and move the load to the Team Track. This clears the mainline and allows the switcher to work the load. Since the peddler freight is programmed to pause at the peddler stop and then proceed, if you are tied up with the switcher, the peddler will just move on and you can work with the next load when it arrives. The idea is that the peddler can just keep supplying new cars for you to use as you wish. Every fifteen minutes a passenger or peddler will be generated, but the sequence is random. I program the peddler with the types of cars that can be used in the yard.

The route does not use industry-enabled tracks such as LARS. I only placed industry track marks at suggested points. You can rename them or replace them with the LARS industries that you wish to use.

Here are some pictures of the route as it appears in this version:


West end of the yard.


East end of the yard.


The dock area of the yard.

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Article and screen shots �2008 John D'Angelo. All rights reserved.

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