Lets talk about freight stations.

Here's one on my layout....used to sell a kit for a simplified version, too.

Get ready to google your favorite railroads and locations to find particular places and practices.  However, there are quite a few general practices that you can easily model.

What about a short line, small town station.

 

Would it be prototypical for a passenger train to pull up to a station, and freight unloaded from the baggage cars as passengers in the coaches got on the train as others leave?

It would be absolutely prototypical to unload and load mail and express between baggage cars and baggage carts during station stops.  Until after WW II that is how most town received their mail and parcels.  If you imagine all the mail plus UPS and FedEx packages going to your town today riding in the head end cars of yesteryears 5:15 you should be able to picture a lot of activity.

A small town station might also have a freight room for carload or less than car load shipments to and from local customers without their own siding.  A house track and or team track would often be on the back side of the station to spot cars for loading and unloading.

I want to include one on my layout.  Are they usually close to passenger stations?   What kind of cars did they service?  REA freight on passenger trains?  Box cars?

A freight house might be near a passenger station.  A large city might have several for different railroads, different types of commodities or different neighborhoods. 

Seattle had an entire complex of post office annexes, express houses and a Sears catalog warehouse (now Starbucks HQ) all within blocks of King Street (GN & NP) and Union (UP & Milwaukee) Passenger Stations.  The former Kingdome and today's Seahawks and Mariners stadiums take up some of that area.

Further north the NP had the Terry Avenue Freight House to serve warehouses and manufacturers in that area.  Freight cars were loaded and loaded on the east side of the long narrow building and wagons or truck were loaded and unloaded on the west side.

Here is a link with views of the Terry Avenue line.

http://coastdaylight.com/seattle/terry_avenue_2.html

This is a Jack Delano OWI photo of the South Walker Street Terminal in Chicago in 1943.  Note the Reefers here.

This is the truck side.

Shorpy is a good place to view Delano photos.

http://www.shorpy.com/jack-delano-photos

Classic trains also features many aerial views of terminals with buildings labeled.

By definition, a freight station is one that is owned and operated by the railroad itself.  There were other "freight" buildings that were owned by various firms including REA as well as private freight forwarders.  Generally, but not necessarily, they were located somewhere near the passenger station, depending largely on the configuration of the track in the area and the available real estate nearby.  A lot of freight stations had once been passenger stations that had outlived their usefulness, were too small or just not up to passenger standards, and so were converted to freight use.   Many smaller town stations were equipped to handle both freight and passengers in the same building.

A freight station did require some sort of siding, in most cases, because the RR couldn't tie up the main while freight was being loaded or unloaded.  These sidings were generally called "team tracks" in reference to the team of horses that served the freight station in the days before motor vehicles.

Up until the middle of the last century, railroads shipped a lot of LCL freight (less than carload) and this was an important part of their overall business.  Gradually this freight was taken over by Railway Express, eventually U.P.S.and of course, the motor freight lines.  Today, no railroad offers LCL service and so freight stations are pretty much obsolete.

Paul Fischer

I can think of some rather impressive freight houses once standing in small towns,

a few still standing.  While, as noted above a freight house was owned by and dedicated to that railroad, I have wondered about two other structures I would like to

add to justify a lot of REA and baggage cars, and a lot of RPO's, from different roads.

I am assuming a central urban REA facility, such as "rattler21" has pictured above, would could get cars from all the roads that entered the city, switched there from each, but would this be true for a large postal facility?  Would you see RPO's from U.P, D&RGW, C&S, ATSF, R.I., CB&Q, and Mopac all at the same large postal structure,

switched in from the yards of their respective roads?

The Sacramento Northern had a lot of LCL freight between Oakland, CA and Sacramento, about 100 miles apart.  The night freight would pick up the boxcar at the freight station last thing so it was always against the locomotives.  There was a car ferry across Suisun Bay, about half way, so the north bound train would put its cars on the ferry, but the locomotivees would stay behind.  Later the ferry would return with the south bound train and the locomotives would couple up and head back to Oakland.  The south bound LCL boxcar was on the front of the train.  When the train arrived in Oakland the boxcar was set out to the freight station.  As far as I know, this happened every day for years.

On the right are the tracks of the N&W Freight Station in Roanoke, Va. Today it is the home of the Virginia Museum of Transportation. (The passenger train is running against the current of traffic on the eastbound main line.)

Just above the last car in the train you can see 2nd St. Crossing. To its left is a peaked building which is the Railway Express Freight Station. Further in the distance, but hard to see is the Roanoke Passenger Station.

Nice Picture Big Jim.... Is that the freight  shed(s) to the right of the pic. It looks like they load something there. 

Yes.

Excellent image Jim! 

Thanks for the info so far.

I was thinking small town though.  WWII era.

I will have my great lakes car ferry, and I am unsure if they really brought freight across the lakes that are not loaded onto rail cars but I was thinking that I would have my freight station/train depot close to the car ferry.  The passenger train I am planning on running is just a ten wheeler pulling 1 coach and 1 combo car.  It would be running commuter type of train.  It might pull up to the freight depot, have some freight unloaded to the depot, and that freight is brought over to the car ferry on carts to be loaded into a freight hold on the ferry.  Some freight that was previously unloaded from the ferry would be waiting at the depot to be loaded onto the same train.

Once in awhile the train would pull a full baggage car at the end of the train along with its normal 2 car consist.  The baggage car would be dropped at the depot then be loaded onto the ferry to be transported across Lake Michigan.   In all my research I have never come across this happening in real life but it might be a service my RR will offer.   

Here's the Seaboard Freight House in Savannah:

I'm going to try to find a photo of the one here in Portsmouth, don't ever recall seeing it.

Here's a SAL Freight Station in Richmond Va, 1954:

Here's the old ACL/SAL Freight Station in Weldon NC:

Here's a link to some photos of stations/depots of small RRs:

http://taplines.net/

As mentioned above, here is the Roanoke REA freight station with two designated tracks.

And the freight station at Buena Vista, Va. with its separate track adjacent to the main line. Note the "Scale House" in the foreground.

  Lots of small towns had the freight shed built right on to the station..    The operator or station agent would look after train orders, selling tickets and looking after freight.

Anything goes, it's your railway. You might even see a box car on the local pass train.(well maybe in the summer)

 Up North in Mi. one, or two stations had two "freight platforms". One on either side of the passenger loading area. Some "half way" or "private stops" little more that "fruit stands" and heavy boards to unload with. I remember one like that on the old Mac line between Topinabee (which itself is smaller than mwb's model, or its prototype anyhow) & Cheboygan. Also one near Twinsburg, or Aurora Oh I liked. Oh I remember a bunch in Canada too.  

 *At the old home on the hill, in the yard on the NE corner of Dix & Outer Drive, Allen Park/Melvindale boarder, there is/was a flatbed truck sized, one pour, concrete block. 

 It was a freight drop (which my Gramps received a mill at in the 70s. The home owners permission was granted, and it was necessary to drive an electric forklift 2 miles there, recharge at the house, drive the mill the other way to a truck that had to do a 4 mile loop because Outer Drive is a "no load" road going east).

 The arched door warehouses, South of the Detroit Post Office, on Fort Street, once had rails running there. The streets of Detroit actually had rails almost everywhere in the early 1900s. Traction companies everywhere. You'd be almost hard pressed to find a pre-war downtown street photo without some type of rails in the background. 

 Ann Arbor, in Corktown, "above" the park, along the river, is a very old depot with arched doorways & lots of double doors. Nicely maintained outside I think it was also a fruit market & a city storage facility at one time or another. (actually it looks very much like Andre's latest depot posts[the lazer etch guy]