Blocking in the Steam Era

 This is in response to a clinic given by Mark Amfahr. If anyone reading this does not know Mark, he has a long history working with the prototype, both nationally and internationally. He is very knowledgable in many aspects of our hobby.

So basically what Mark is saying is that in the Steam Era railroads blocked freight trains differently than they do in the diesel era. The blocking procedures were, in large part, dictated by the technology of the times.

A Steam engine could only really travel a short distance before it required maintenance, so railroads worked yard to yard.

(What follows is a gross simplification) let’s say for example the railroad had a west bound train. It starts in Yard D and travels west. It carries cars for yards C, B, and A. 

At C the railroad sends the engine into the round house, the caboose into the caboose track, and yards that train. It pulls out all the cars for C, and adds all the cars for B & A. This train might look like this “B,B,B,A,A,A,B,A,B,A,A,B,B,B”.

After a day or more dwell time this west bound continues its journey, with a new engine, new caboose, and every car for points west.

At Yard B this train stops again, and the entire barn dance begins again, and again after a couple days dwelling in “B” this train continues west, with every “A” car they can find.

At “A” this train terminates.

Now imagine a train with 26 letters! 

Here’s my point. At no point in the East did the railroad make up a train of all “A” cars (What I’d call “Distant Blocking”) and send it on its way. What it did was to send a train west, and load it up with every “West” car it had. At each station they then took out every car bound for that station, and put in every car going “West” from that point, and off we go.

Railroads in the Steam Era treated Car Load freight much the same way it treated LCL freight. You keep unloading and reloading the LCL packages as they get closer to their final destination, until you end up with a car load of LCL packages going to the same destination. Yes this description is an over-simplification, but not that much. And YES, there were a lot of exceptions, but in general this appears to be the process.

Now, generally,  we all recoil in terror from this idea. We all, for the most part, like to distant block. I think it’s because all of us, even 65 year old me, are children of the diesel era.

You’re not harming anyone by distant blocking. It makes working the trains easier when they come into your yard. But if you are modeling 1932, 1942, or 1952 the railroads you are modeling did it a bit different.

Mark Amfahr has a great deal to say about yard operation. A lot of it I agree with whole heartedly (The part about being flexible with train length is particularly near and dear to my heart), and some of it I find more difficult to accept, yet I did it that way, for the most part, without thinking about it.

So because a steam engine had to stop every 100 miles or so, so did freight. And when diesels could run through an entire division with out stopping every hundred miles, so did the freight.


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