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Small Rail Storage Yard

Large Versions: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2790495221

This storage yard allows for parking your rail cars in the open to act as storage, or transfer them to a different locomotive. Speed up throughput at industries by using a pair of back to back yards with a locomotive on station to pull empties from one yard, load them at the industry, and leave the loaded cars at the other yard for pickup. Your mainline trains can then simply drop off empty cars and trade them for loaded ones for faster turnaround times.

This building takes advantage of the fact that Rail Distribution Offices allow drop off and pick up of loaded cars. Unfortunately there's no way to sort cars by type or loaded/empty status so it's best to keep each yard to a specific type of car and commodity. It could also be used as a normal Rail Distribution Office, though that isn't the intent and it only has one locomotive slot. Construction costs are based on the cost of building the same layout of concrete tracks, plus a little extra for the gate house, and the overall cost is comparable to other storage buildings.

The yard can be used on its own, or back to back as in some of the images with one for empties, and the other for loaded cars.

An example route setup for one potential use for the yard is in the images using three trains, a switcher at each end of the route, and a mainline train to move cars from end to end of the line.

The mainline train loads trains (loaded coal hoppers) at the "full" storage yard at the mine, then unloads trains at the "full" storage yard at the power plant. It then loads trains (empty coal hoppers) at the "empty" storage yard at the power plant, and takes them to the "empty" storage yard at the mine and unloads trains, then repeats by picking up more loaded cars at the "full" yard.

At the mine the switcher loads trains at the "empty" mine yard, loads coal at the aggregate loader, then unloads trains at the "full" mine yard. Meanwhile at the other end of the line the power plant switcher loads trains at the "full" power plant yard, unloads coal at the aggregate unloading, then unloads trains at the "empty" power plant yard.

The switcher routes are very short and can use cheaper, slower locomotives, while loading and unloading cars at the storage yards is faster for the mainline train. All three trains work in parallel, and additional trains can be run on each route if needed depending on needed capacity and length of the line between industries.