Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Paperwork for activating the new staging yard BRJ

 "BRJ" stands for Black River Junction, the name I'm giving to the new staging yard we just installed in the space between Interbay yard and Harbor Island/Legotown. It's main role is to store the UP & MILW transfer freights and BN passenger trains off the layout to allow the Argo yard to be more useful to operators. The yard is physically complete, but for it to truly be in operation, it needed a diagram showing which tracks are where and called what, and some car card boxes conveniently located for storing the car and loco cards accompanying the stored trains.

Here's the track diagram I came up with. Its somewhat antiquated layout style is based on the BN SPINS diagrams of the era, so it will fit in to the SPINS booklet that operators can use to navigate the layout. I also will post the map next to the car card boxes to allow quick reference.






































You can see at the top of the diagram a short spur labeled "MILW LOCOS", which will be a small engine servicing facility for MILW and UP loco storage to also get those locos off the active part of the layout. This will free up space at both Stacy and Argo yards, and it is under construction.

The other "accessory" the yard needed was some car card boxes labeled for the various tracks. Here's what I came up with for that:




Here's a cropped version of the map, rotated so you can compare the box labels to the maps. As you can see, we already have some of the tracks filled with their intended subjects.











I'll post a picture of the new MILW engine terminal as soon as we get it built. All in good time...