Surveying techniques?

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rkcarguy
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by rkcarguy »

^^^ This is true. My re-build of my HO scale train set as a kid went onto a 6' wide table, so I could do a 32" radius. The leading wheel on my SD40-2's would always hop the rails at any joiner in a curve when I was stuck with a 48" wide table(22" radius).
Incidentally the 32" radius is about 40' in our scale, which is still too tight if translated to full size. Minimum radius on the real RR runs 330' or more if I remember correctly, and this takes in account diesels that have trucks which articulate, not X-8-X steamers.
Your route will ultimately decide though.
Cary Stewart
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by Cary Stewart »

Except for the Smith Valley run the main line curves on LALs track is 60ft radius minimum. A Santa Fe 2-10-4 barely made it around our main line but derailed when it tried the SV line. Think in long term usage and guests engine sizes to determine your minimum radius. By the way. We found many years ago that a RRSC CP 173 can go around a 25 ft radius if you make he draw bar between engine and tender about an inch longer.
Cary
jscarmozza
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by jscarmozza »

90 acres is a large parcel, you should try to find a topo map with 2' contours, possibly from the county planning board or soil conservation district, if you don't have it on your property survey. Use the topo map to lay out your route, then transfer it to the ground. Good luck, it's fun, but a lot of work. John
Glenn Brooks
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by Glenn Brooks »

90 acres of slightly hill countryside in a Mediterranean climate! Man on man sounds like years of fun! We need pictures BTW! Forum rules. No pictures, it didn’t happen :D

Post a couple of shots of your terrain and it will give folks a better idea of the landscape features you will be dealing with.

Also, what are the soil conditions? And do you have wetlands or seasonal creeks? I ask this because often there are county zoning restrictions on the parts of lands having environmentally sensitive area designations. If you have deep soil cover, or bedrock near the surface, makes a difference how easy it is to prepare the sub grade.

What do you have as an over all grade change in one direction or another ? Unless you are designing a logging railroad, limited to gear driven loco’s, You will want to keep your grade at or less than 2% in all areas. That is actually a lot of hill climbing given the amount of acreage you have available. 2’ rise in every 100’ is quite a lot of elevation change. Adds up quickly.

Also, the hills offer you an opportunity to do some cool trestle building and easy cut and fill for the swales and sides of hills.

With that much land to work with, I would encourage you to consider at the larger gauges, 12” or even 15” gauge. There are some very nicely restored MTC G12s and occasionally 15” loco’s and train sets on DLS.org. Sometimes, not always, at decent prices. Often Comparably priced to 7.5” equipment. Plus, if you have a working ranch or any need for motorized access to,the property, the Grand Scale gauges actually can haul some serious Tonage.

Regarding laying out your ROW, you can get full fledged commercial GIS software for nearly free from ESRI.com these days - for personal home use. It’s like google maps on steroids. You can add google sattelight imagery and all kinds of county GIS data, including topographic data and often hi resolution Lidar data. This will give you a potentially very high resolution base map of your entire parcel - by which you can lay out any ROW scenario you can think of. For example, select all the elevation contours on your 90 acres with 3 or 4 feet of your desired mid point on your mainline, and the GIS app will show you where your ROW can be. Pretty cool stuff.

Anyway, sounds like a great project. Lots of possibilities and great potential. Let us know how you progress.

Glenn
Moderator - Grand Scale Forum

Motive power : 1902 A.S.Campbell 4-4-0 American - 12 5/8" gauge, 1955 Ottaway 4-4-0 American 12" gauge

Ahaha, Retirement: the good life - drifting endlessly on a Sea of projects....
Pontiacguy1
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by Pontiacguy1 »

In general, the wider you can make your curves and the less you can make your grades, the better and more prototypically your railroad will run. Pretty much any steamer from a 4-8-4 on down should be able to run on a 60 foot minimum radius, although you should try to make as many of your curves as wide and sweeping as you can. As for the grade, shoot for 2% as your maximum, but don't be too worried if you get a little bit above that for a short section if you have to. 2% is not a hard-and-fast limit, even for rod locomotives. At Mid-South, our ruling grade is just over 3%, and we have all kinds of trains that run there all the time very successfully from small LE 4-4-0s all the way up to 2-8-4s and 4-8-4s. However, it will greatly diminish the amount you can pull with a given locomotive, so again, keeping the grades down will help a lot.

Story: One guy came up to Mid-South several years ago with a nice Mogul. It was a Little Engines mogul, good size, nice and heavy, big cylinders, etc... He had not had it very long, and was bragging about how much it would pull. He said that he pulled 32 cars around the track at Largo, Florida, and was talking real big about how good he could engineer it and how strong his locomotive was, etc... Largo is a fairly flat track with only a few grades and those aren't so steep. I told him that here he would find that we had some pretty serious grades, and that his locomotive would be able to do roughly 1/4 what it would do down there because of it. He actually got mad, like I had insulted him or something! A couple of hours later, I saw that he had borrowed a bunch of cars, had about 17 or 18 on there, and was attempting to make a run at the hill. He was off and pushing pretty quickly. He dropped about 5 cars off, tried it again, and was again pushing. After a couple of more attempts he finally got down to about 9 cars, and made it around successfully without having to push. Lesson from this tale: the steeper the grade the more it will affect the train length and weight you can handle, so as far as grades go, less is more.
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NP317
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by NP317 »

The "rule" I was taught for railroad grades is that every 1% increase in grade requires a doubling of motive power for a given train weight.
And that has been my experience operating full-sized steam locomotives hauling tourist passenger trains. Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad has some 3% grades on binding curves near Mineral Creek, and that proved the lesson every trip.

That calculates out about right for your story. Pretty funny.
Lesson: Unplug your ego if you want to succeed.
Alternate: Every 1% of grade requires half the amount of ego...
Jus' saying'.
~RN
ccvstmr
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by ccvstmr »

Does somebody out there in "Chaski-land" have one of those RRSC engineering manuals? Think there was a table in there that showed a loco has 10% of the pulling power on a 2% or 2.5% grade compared to level track. For some reason, that number sticks in the mind.

In my own experience, have never performed a load test on a level track. However, I know I can pull 1000 to 1200 pounds up a 2.5% grade at my home club track. This is usually in the 10 to 12 car range.
148-4875x.jpg
Of course, it doesn't do any good to have that much pulling power for the uphill...if you can't control your speed on the down hill side of the RR! Just sayin'. Carl B.
Life is like a sewer...what you get out of it depends on what you put into it!
I don't walk on water...I just learned where some of the stepping stones are!
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chiloquinruss
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by chiloquinruss »

One more thing to make sure you add into your plan is drainage / runoff. It looks like you are going up a little bit of a valley which means you might be at the BOTTOM of the runoff. Some ditches on the sides with an occasional cross drain may help. We are technically high mountain desert but winter runoff plays havoc with the right of way. Russ
Pontiacguy1
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by Pontiacguy1 »

Drag Racers have a saying: "spinnin' ain't winning", And a similar saying in the Live steam world might be 'Slidin' ain't Stoppin". Definitely need to make sure you have enough brake power for your given train size.
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Erskine Tramway
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by Erskine Tramway »

The tonnage rating on the Rio Grande's narrow gauge engines was determined by how many, and how large, air pumps they had. They were as much concerned with how well they could control the train downhill, as how much they could pull.

Mike
Former Locomotive Engineer and Designer, Sandley Light Railway Equipment Works, Inc. and Riverside & Great Northern Railway 1962-77
BN RR Locomotive Engineer 1977-2014, Retired
rkcarguy
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by rkcarguy »

I'm looking at 2.5-3% grades on my RR, and I'm more worried about brakes than I am getting up the hill. Thankfully, I'll be coming up hill with the firewood and going back down empty, but still plan brakes on all cars.
Another question to ask, is steam or diesel? Diesels have more driven wheels, for instance an SD40-2 would have 12, whereas even a X-8-X steam engine is only going to have 8.
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NP317
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Re: Surveying techniques?

Post by NP317 »

Train Brakes are ALWAYS the determining factor in how much weight a locomotive can handle.
After rebuilding and improving the brakes on my steamer and cars this past year, I can safely handle several more loaded cars down grades.
Safety First.
~RN
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