The Palmer Industrial Park

I'm in the early stages of building an N scale layout representing the Palmer Industrial Park, served by the New England Central railroad.  Why a separate second layout?  I got to thinking about it because I found myself wanting to model some larger industries than could be fit in my space in O scale.  I also wanted to keep the O scale switching layout, which meant the remaining available space was too small to model larger industries in HO scale.  Hence the choice of N scale on a second layout.

In addition to modeling larger industries, I also wanted to get more of a prototypical feel to the track arrangement.  I used # 5 turnouts on my O scale layout - unrealistically sharp.  After spending some time with satellite photos measuring angles of switches on industrial track I was interested in, I came to the conclusion that # 10 switches were just about right.  I verified this with a tape measure on a field trip to a location with a switch in a parking lot I could measure the frog taper on.

In real life the Palmer Industrial Park is in Bondsville, MA, just north of Three Rivers and Palmer.  It's worked by a local out of the NECR yard at Palmer.  I'll write a post about the prototype at some point, but for now suffice it to say that I couldn't squeeze in an exact replica of the park.  So I took all the interesting pieces, shuffled them around to fit, and used a little imagination.

Trackplan for the Palmer Industrial Park

The peninsula is 16 feet long, and 3 feet wide at the left end.  It's slightly odd shape at the right (wall) end lets it fit between the door and the O scale switching layout.

Edit 1/18/2015: I realize I neglected to include a few details here.  All turnouts are #10. The big curve around the end is 16" radius, the minimum radius everywhere else is 24", and most curves are much bigger radius than that.  The easement offset is 0.25".  Track and switches are Atlas code 55.

The park has a long lead which comes in from the NECR main at Barrett's.  The lead is the track next to the aisle marked Lead on the track plan above.  The runaround and it's tail track head off back to the right and disappear into the weeds - the presumption is there used to be more industry over there but it's now abandoned.  The runaround holds 20 50 foot N scale cars.  One option I considered during planning was to put the runaround on the lead and eliminate the "extra" track.  However with the potential for 15-25 inbound cars and 15-25 outbound cars in a session the additional space will come in very handy.

The only industry on the lead side of the peninsula is Quaboag Reload (pronounced "kway-bog").  Quaboag is patterned after a combination of the now defunct Quaboag Transfer that was a large customer in the real Palmer Industrial Park, and Wildwood Reload - an industry on the Massachusetts Central RR in South Barre, MA.  Pretty much anything that needs to move between rail and truck can show up here.  Common loads will be lumber on centerbeams, wood pellets, paper rolls, and building materials in box cars, pipe in gondolas, sheet steel in coil cars, etc.  The first warehouse on the lead is completely enclosed, the second is open at the track end.  The large areas in between and at the end of the track are for unloading lumber, pipe, etc. that don't need indoor storage.

The industry just around the corner is initially going to be Cains - an N scale version of the same industry I have on my O scale layout.  What I really want to put there is another industry from the real Palmer Industrial Park - American Dry Ice.  However there are no N scale CO2 cars available at the moment.  Atlas makes some nice vegetable oil funnel flow tanks, so it's Cains for now, and if/when CO2 cars appear I'll replace Cains with American Dry Ice.

The next industry is Trans Plastics.  In the real Palmer Industrial Park this industry is at the end of the park track, but it seems to fit better when I've put it in my available space.  Trans Plastics has space for around 20 covered hoppers loaded with plastic pellets.  As with the real one when it was still in business, the industry will be close to full most of the time, but only release and receive 2-4 cars a session.  Since there are a lot of different grades of plastic in the various cars that get used up as needed, the cars released may be scattered around, so this industry will be interesting to switch.

The final industry is Maple Leaf Distribution.  In real life Maple Leaf now has 3 pairs of tracks serving 18 doors.  Before their addition of a few years ago, it was 1 pair of tracks serving 10 doors.  I plan to compress reality a bit to make the "original" building have 7 spots spaced for 50 foot cars (like the original 10 on the real thing), and the "new" building on the same pair of tracks have 3 spots for 60 foot cars (like the new spots on the real thing).  Maple Leaf receives lots of paper rolls and a number of other commodities in box cars and ships them out by truck.  They also receive recycled paper by truck and ship it out by box car.  They generally assign cars to doors to minimize movement through the warehouse.  There may also be respots (a car not completely unloaded needs to be moved to pull/spot another car, then returned to where it was).  A car that was on the outside track and not completely unloaded may need to be respotted at the same door on the inside track.  The combination of specific door assignments, respots, and the two tracks should make for some very interesting switching.

The main park track continues past Maple Leaf and fades into the weeds at the wall.  The almost 20 car lengths between the Maple Leaf switch and the wall will provide needed space for sorting cars and stashing outbound cars out of the way.

The current state of the railroad is bare benchwork, with a full size trackplan tapped to it (more on that later).  The benchwork is actually a re-purposed section of what was originally planned to be a larger O scale layout.