An opportunity to buy some more code 55 turnouts will allow me to add a classification yard to my yard. As a quick re-cap the yard on my layout is also my staging yard, in the first iteration of the plan it contained five loops and a small loco shop area.

I managed to get an assortment of medium and large radius turnouts which will allow me to have a calssification yard and switch lead. The idea being that manifest trains are made up from the cars in these tracks and then broken down upon their arrival back to the yard area. I don’t know how I will do the operating schema for car forwarded as the cars wont have industries on the layout so it may be left upto the switch crew to choose cars for the train based on a quantiy of each car required for each train.

By sacrificing one of the through loops in the yard I was able to add a 7 road classification yard which will have a capacity of 79 cars. The classification yard is served from a 27 car capacity arrival and departure tracks.

The loops in Green and Purple on the plan allow me to store four unit trains in the main yard although with layouts out on the railroad this is really about 6 unit trains in total. Each with a capacity of 40-50 50′ cars but the passing sidings will only take trains with a max length of 40 cars plus locos so they won’t fill the sidings.

The loco servicing area has now had a re-vamp with two additional tracks and yes that’ll mean more Gevos & Dash 9’s.

So here is the whole yard area I am hoping that not being able to see each end of the train will trick you into thinking that the train is actually bigger than it really is. The use of mid train DPUs will help even more with this illusion.