Prototypical Operations

@The-576-Guy posted:

I've been contemplating modeling Chicago during the early 1950s for quite some time now.

Well, you are in luck.  Lots of train movements were made by use of trackage rights, as well as by use of the Belt Railway of Chicago, the Baltimore & Ohio Chicago Terminal, and the Indiana Harbor Belt.  That caused trains of different railroads to use the same track at various locations within Chicago.

Also, the passenger stations, except for the C&NW terminal, all served multiple railroads and the result of that was more use of the same track by more than one railroad's passenger trains.  The Chicago & Western Indiana was host to a lot of this.

In the 70s, I guess back to the 50s, there were complicated work agreement between the RRs and unions regarding who did what.

As I understand it, most or all moves when one RR delivered a cut to another via trackage rights, the power and caboose returned to home rails light.    In other words, the BN would take a cut to the nearest EJE yard, and the locos would run back to their home  yard with only  the caboose.

I have a friend who models the EJ&E which is the beltway around Chicago and that is the way he handles the interchange moves.     The "J" was crossed by every RR that entered Chicago, so it had lots of interchange.

You couldn't pick a better location to run locos from many, many different roads. That said, it depends how much you are interested in researching real railroad operations in order to copy them. There is probably no single location in Chicago that has EVERY railroad. My suggestion is to make some choices about which roads are most important to you, in order. Then you can look for the part of Chicago that best fits.

The B&O Historical Society magazine The Sentinel ran a multi-part series a couple of years ago about operations on the B&OCT written by a former dispatcher, which included photos of trains from many roads. That might be one source for you to review. One B&ORRHS member has an HO layout completely focused on B&OCT operations in 1956 based on detailed prototype information. That might be deeper than you want to go.

Do you really want accuracy or do you want to have fun?  Yes, Chicago had multiple rail terminals all centrally located near the downtown / lakefront area, and most of those terminals (if not all, except the C&NW terminal) had multi-railroad passenger trains arriving and departing, which means your model can run PRR, NYC, AT&SF, CB&Q, B&O, IC, GTW, Wabash, N&W, etc.

But I, like most modelers, will not have the room to model multiple terminal structures with their attendant yards.  Thus, I plan to "loosely" represent Chicago with a single multi-track Union Station that will even house some railroads that never actually made it to Chicago.  (I just love the SP Sunset Ltd, and in my world, it will terminate in Chicago.)

To each his, or her, own, but why let prototype reality spoil our fun?

Chuck