YSP Yard and Engine Terminal

This area located in Merced, Ca. is the heart and soul of operations on the YSP. This area is where engines are stored and serviced.

Coal, Oil, diesel fuel, water, and sand are all available to the crews. Before an crew can leave and do their runs, they must get their engine serviced. What type of engine they have will determine what services are needed and where they must go to get that service.

There is a steam area, a diesel area, an inspection pit where repairs and inspections take place, and a washing area also.

Learn about the cool Flip Up Transfer Table Fiddle Yard.

Clicking here will take you down to the section on how this idea works.

Below is the evolution of the YSP engine terminal. It too has gone under many changes with tracks moved and more added etc.

Click here to see the pictures in order of the terminal construction.

I used cardboard cut outs of the foot print of the buildings to help figure out their locations.

Rough draft of where things will go.

Boy, did things change a lot down the road !

All the gears are removed from the Atlas turntable so it indexes any where now. I also filled in all the cutouts it came with where it originally indexed. It is power routed also. It is turned manually with some poles that come off it at an angle, just like the real ones.

Note the middle track. It goes down a grade to the bottom of the pit so supplies or trucks and wheels can be gotten to easily by the work men.

The track at the bottom will run over the pit later. I put a couple work crew welding down in the pit with a flashing light to simulate the arc welder.

Track now running over pit and crane is located in place. There is an ash pit also on the left. It is located on the main track coming into the yard so engines can dump their ashes before entering the yard.

An engine being repaired, parked over the pit.

30 + year old building, getting a face lift.

All the light colored wood is new

I forgot how hard it was to make tiny coal chutes.

Fuel and Water Tower, now in place. Note the workers on the upper deck. (You can't see the rope in the picture but that white board is being hauled up by the worker)

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Space is always an issue for everyone and I'm no different. I had no room left to put in a Fiddle Yard without blocking off the ability for crewman to walk around the layout. I pondered all kinds of ideas, but not really worked well. I had pretty much came to the conclusion that it would have to be some kind of pull up, drop down type of yard so people could walk around it when needed. But only one track was leaving the layout in Merced, so what kind of a fiddle yard was one 3 foot piece of track be? Then out of the blue one night I was thinking about it and thought about transfer tables. These give you the ability to move laterally and giving you as many tracks as you want, all going into one track.

Next came, how in the world am I going to do this. I drove to Home Depot, went into the hardware section and literally sat on a box looking at all the components they had on a wall display. In my head I was trying this, tweaking that to see if I could come up with anything that would work.

It turned out that they had some drawer slides that moved very smoothly and they came in different lengths so you could make your transfer table as big or small as you want. I bought a set and raced home. Over the weekend it all came into place perfectly. I now had a fold down fiddle yard with 4, 3 foot sections of track, that's 12 feet of yard guys I didn't have before!

YSP & Southern Pacific Interchange area.

The first two tracks I designated for San Fransico traffic,

Track 1 is incoming to Merced. (This is where the yard man makes up trains to be picked up and brought onto the layout.)

Track 2 is outbound traffic going to San Fransico where cars leave the layout.

Track 3 is incoming from Los Angeles. (This is where the yard man makes up trains to be picked up and brought onto the layout.)

Track 4 is outbound traffic going to Los Angeles where cars leave the layout.

When not in use, the yard drops down out of the way. I let the crews flip up the yard also to help them switch in the town of Kittridge as it's a tight area without a run around track, so this really helps them out.

One track coming off the layout feeds the 4 track Fiddle Yard at Merced. Flipped down here so crew can walk around.

Track is currently aligned for the San Fransico out bound train. The cars will be parked here and the yard man will remove them from the yard back into storage until Rail Ops calls for them again.

I used an Atlas turn table becaue I didn't have room for my large turn table. Back to that space is a premium problem again! I wanted it to be able to index any where as my tracks did not come off where the turntable normally indexes too. I pulled the unit apart and removed all the gears and index parts. I then filled in all the slots to make the top rim solid all the way around. I also wanted an older looking turntable so I built a gallows out of plastic and painted it wood color.

Hand poles were added to turn the table. Grandt Line nuts and bolts where used for detail.

I added wire and turn buckles for the support features also. They are hard to see, but they are there.