Small yard with engine shed is almost complete. Current layout is about 6' x 12'
4 track yard with A/D track, yard lead, engine service, caboose track, and two outer loops with industrial/freight spur take up about 4/5 of space.
Hoping to expand in prototypical manner around the room with main lines to another
yard again in the 7' x 10' area with turntable and roundhouse. Which means I will not be installing those for awhile and want to keep mainlines running.
So I am looking to fill the approx 2' x 5' space as I open up the loops and move down the wall.
Recently acquired two Bethlehem Steel operating gantries with buckets and have added magnets giving them choice of hook, magnet or bucket. The unused tool hangs on a dummy offset pulley attached to the boom using a wire through those unused holes that I am always trying to figure out what they were put there for.
And I finally found the MPC parts to make my Lionel Coal tipple kit actually work. It was designed with a manual lever but might add a solenoid. And not sure why they stopped including the parts in the newer kits.
I have a K-line fixed scrap crane and tomorrow via Ups will be arriving another hook on a self propelled gantry using a rather unique under and over layout tensioned belt/cable with under the table drive motor. Control wires extend and retract as required. Idea is similar to Dc screw drive discussed here and on other forums and featured in a magazine and YouTube Vids.
Hope it works, but like everything it might take some fiddling to get it working right.
Might be too Rubie Goldberg but sometimes you never know till they arrive
and you set them up.
Have some 37" Gargraves crane rails and also thinking of spanning some parallel tracks to get some cross loading of cars.
Looking for photo of layouts or prototypes of combo coal/ scrap/ and maybe ballast yards if they existed or if someone invented one. No requirement to even use all of the cranes but would like to use the matched set. Not sure what Bethlehem Steel would be using just the buckets for either.
There is a pair of almost identical real ones with hooks that I have seen everyday from my office for about 20 years in a functioning drydock across the street.
But not about to convert to a harbor layout
at this point.
All feedback and ideas will be considered and appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Fred
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