The East side switch job is a little more complicated because there is no local runaround track, so you have to be really careful about what order you do your moves in or else you will find yourself making multiple trips to the other side of town to do a runaround move.
Our East side work begins as we pull past Caitlin Chemical...
The East side has a mix of facing and trailing-point spurs. We start by pulling the empty gondola from Andrews Manufacturing from the facing point spur because we'll need the full length of it to clear the switch points when we pull all the trailing point cars. We grab the gon and shove it onto the Midland Valve spur for now.
There are two empty tank cars already on the spur that we'll pick up later. With that out of the way, we go back and pick up an empty gondola from Fluid Dynamics, two empty covered hoppers from the Dixie-Max Bottling Plant and two tank cars from Caitlin Chemical -- one loaded with specialty chemicals bound for Windy City Biscuit (back on the West side) and one loaded with lubricants headed for Lake Erie Screw in Cleveland.
This is where you have to think things through. We have five cars we need to runaround to place them on the storage track for the Turn crew to pick up later. But at the same time, we don't want to make two trips to the runaround, so we have to look at what deliveries we have and try to make this into one trip.
We have four empty tank cars bound for Caitlin Chemical plus a cattle car headed to Champion Meat Packing. The cattle car is a facing point delivery and is ready to go. The tank cars are trailing point deliveries and the engine is on the wrong side, so we need to runaround them. What we end up doing is grabbing the four tankers with the front of our engine, with the other five cars still on the tail end.
We'll drag them all to the runaround and switch positions so that the tankers are behind us and the other pickups are in front of us so we can put them with the other ones we grabbed earlier and put on the Midland Valve track.
Before we leave, we'll go ahead and spot the CGW stock car at Champion to save us the trouble later and get it out of the way.
Runaround time. We spot the four tankers on the shorter track, back up, then head down the passing track. We leave the five pickups behind us and grab the other end of the tankers and push them back the way we came. Once clear of the switch points, we pull forward and grab the five empties, reverse course and head back East.
We push the empties onto the Midland spur and connect them to the gondola and two tankers already there. We'll leave the string on this spur so the local turn can put the new deliveries on the actual storage track and pull the pickups from the Midland spur. This will save us from having to move the string later.
With that done it's just a matter of dropping off the four tankers at Caitlin Chemical. Once we cut them loose, our job is done and we head back home.
Notes: As you can see, large parts of the layout are incomplete in this section. There are also several "stand-in" buildings for what will be the real buildings, notably the two-track engine house sitting in for Andrews Mfg.
Next up: The Turn
Our East side work begins as we pull past Caitlin Chemical...
The East side has a mix of facing and trailing-point spurs. We start by pulling the empty gondola from Andrews Manufacturing from the facing point spur because we'll need the full length of it to clear the switch points when we pull all the trailing point cars. We grab the gon and shove it onto the Midland Valve spur for now.
There are two empty tank cars already on the spur that we'll pick up later. With that out of the way, we go back and pick up an empty gondola from Fluid Dynamics, two empty covered hoppers from the Dixie-Max Bottling Plant and two tank cars from Caitlin Chemical -- one loaded with specialty chemicals bound for Windy City Biscuit (back on the West side) and one loaded with lubricants headed for Lake Erie Screw in Cleveland.
This is where you have to think things through. We have five cars we need to runaround to place them on the storage track for the Turn crew to pick up later. But at the same time, we don't want to make two trips to the runaround, so we have to look at what deliveries we have and try to make this into one trip.
We have four empty tank cars bound for Caitlin Chemical plus a cattle car headed to Champion Meat Packing. The cattle car is a facing point delivery and is ready to go. The tank cars are trailing point deliveries and the engine is on the wrong side, so we need to runaround them. What we end up doing is grabbing the four tankers with the front of our engine, with the other five cars still on the tail end.
We'll drag them all to the runaround and switch positions so that the tankers are behind us and the other pickups are in front of us so we can put them with the other ones we grabbed earlier and put on the Midland Valve track.
Before we leave, we'll go ahead and spot the CGW stock car at Champion to save us the trouble later and get it out of the way.
Runaround time. We spot the four tankers on the shorter track, back up, then head down the passing track. We leave the five pickups behind us and grab the other end of the tankers and push them back the way we came. Once clear of the switch points, we pull forward and grab the five empties, reverse course and head back East.
We push the empties onto the Midland spur and connect them to the gondola and two tankers already there. We'll leave the string on this spur so the local turn can put the new deliveries on the actual storage track and pull the pickups from the Midland spur. This will save us from having to move the string later.
With that done it's just a matter of dropping off the four tankers at Caitlin Chemical. Once we cut them loose, our job is done and we head back home.
Notes: As you can see, large parts of the layout are incomplete in this section. There are also several "stand-in" buildings for what will be the real buildings, notably the two-track engine house sitting in for Andrews Mfg.
Next up: The Turn
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