One thing I have never seen covered much is how many freight cars does one need? I've actually referenced this before, when I wrote about MR's project layout Rice Harbor. In that case, I made a "best guess" effort.
However with Ian Rice's Mid-Sized and Managable in hand, I set out to figure this out. Flipping through the plans, it seems the average mid-sized layout is around 150 ft², typically encompassing 3 main focal points (towns, industries, etc.) with around 20 unique car spots. These represent about 10 unique industries and 3 universal ones (freight depot, interchange, team track). That means that on average each town/focal point has around 6-7 unique car spots each.
Note that these figures for industries exclude locomotive and car service areas, which could (and probably should) be viewed as "industries" themselves -- or at least operated as such.
The question then comes up: How many cars would one need to staff such a layout? To pick a number out of the blue, let's say that for each unique car spot we should have 3 cars to keep things fresh. If you're wondering, I picked this number because anyone with a mid-sized layout will probably plan to do operations. Given an ops session of once a month, with 3 cars per unique spot, that means that a car only visits an industry once per quarter, which should be enough to make it feel unique.
Anyways, at 3 cars per unique spot, it would be 60 cars for the average mid-sized layout. It doesn't sound like much until you run some numbers. How much storage track would you need to hold 60 cars? In HO/Sn3/On30, assuming around 7 inches per car, that would be 24 ft of track just to store them, assuming only a third of cars are out on the layout at once. That's about the size of a 8 ft long 4 track yard including the ladder. And then, of course, there's always the cost. That's probably around $1500 which would swing up or down several hundred depending on if you are ok with average quality RTR or prefer high end craftsman kits.
60 cars is a lot of commitment in terms of space, cost, preparation, and maintenance. What I couldn't figure out but really wanted to know was if such a number even makes sense or not. To solve this, I took to the real railroads to figure it out.
My railroad library is primarily narrow gauge. I figure the smaller fleets of narrow gauge lines are probably more closely representative of model railroads anyways, so hopefully it doesn't bias this too much. This little study was restricted to common carriers. It's likely a completely different process if I were to figure out fleet size for, say, a logging railroad.
With that, let's begin.
Ilwaco Railroad & Navigation Company
Source: The Railroad that Ran By the Tide by Raymond FeagansThis railroad was 15 miles long and served about 16 stops. From my research on this line I'd guess half of those were flag stop depots, meaning it had 8 "focal points". Using the numbers from above that means this railroad probably had around 48 unique car spots.
Roster: 10 passenger, 13 boxcars, 29 flat cars, 30 logging cars, 1 caboose
Total: 83 cars
Ratio: 83:48, or 1.72 cars per car spot
Nevada County Narrow Gauge
Source: Nevada County Narrow Gauge by Gerald BestThis railroad was 22 miles long and served 14 towns. Using the same numbers, this means the railroad had around 84 unique car spots.
Roster: 12 passenger, 90 boxcars, 107 flat cars, 7 gondolas, 20 tank cars, 2 cabooses
Total: 238 cars
Ratio: 238:84, or 2.83 cars per spot
Pacific Coast Railway
Source: The Pacific Coast Railway by Kenneth Westcott and Curtiss JohnsonThis railroad served 30 towns, which translates into 180 unique car spots.
Roster: 11 passenger, 79 boxcars, 313 flat cars, 50 gondolas, 13 stock cars, 43 tank cars, 2 cabooses
Total: 511 cars
Ratio: 511:180, or 2.83 cars per spot
Oahu Railway & Land Co.
Source: Next Stop Honolulu by Jim Chiddix and MacKinnon SimpsonServing 82 stops, assuming a third of them were nothing more than passenger stops, this puts the railroad at 330 unique car spots.
Roster: 43 passenger, 499 boxcars, 13 stock cars, 566 flat cars, 100 gondolas, 70 tank cars
Total: 1291 cars
Ratio: 1291:330, or 3.91 cars per spot
Wiscasset, Waterville, & Farmington
Source: Two Feet to Tidewater by Robert Jones and David RegisterServed 19 stops. There is enough documentation in the book that I am counting 10 of these as a focal point, giving it an estimated 60 unique car spots.
Roster: 6 passenger cars, 48 boxcars, 60 flat cars, 10 reefers, 5 gondolas, 2 cabooses
Total: 131 cars
Ratio: 131:60, or 2.18 cars per spot
Florence & Cripple Creek
Source: Colorado Rail Annual No. 13 by Tivis WilkinsThis line served 17 notable towns giving it an estimated 102 unique car spots.
Roster: 16 passenger, 186 boxcars, 6 flat cars, 100 high side gondolas, 13 low side gondolas, 2 reefers, 3 tank cars, 6 cabooses
Total: 322 cars
Ratio: 322:102, or 3.25 cars per spot
Here's a condensed list in case that was too much data:
- IR&N: 1.72 cars/spot
- NCNG: 2.83 cars/spot
- PCR: 2.83 cars/spot
- OR&L: 3.91 cars/spot
- WW&F: 2.18 cars/spot
- F&CC: 3.25 cars/spot
Discarding the outliers for low (IR&N) and high (OR&L), we end up with an average of 2.77 cars per unique spot. So my guess of 3 wasn't too far off!
Back to the original intent: For the average mid-sized layout of 150 ft², that means around 55 cars would be needed to match prototypical car ownership of narrow gauge common carriers.
Since I had already gathered the data, I went ahead and created a spreadsheet of what % each type of car represented on average of the sampled common carrier's rosters. I grouped specialty cars (reefers, stock cars, log cars, etc.) into one category as these will likely be unique per railroad.
- Passenger: 5%
- Boxcars: 33%
- Flatcars: 39%
- Gondolas: 10%
- Tank Cars: 4%
- Cabooses: 1%
- Specialty cars: 8%
As for actual numbers, for the average mid-sized 150 ft² layout in question, here are the car quantities:
- Passenger: 3
- Boxcars: 18
- Flatcars: 21
- Gondolas: 5
- Tank Cars: 2
- Cabooses: 1
- Specialty Cars: 4
To be clear, these are averages, and things will vary based on the railroad's primary industries (example F&CC has a ton of gondolas). However, this gets a general sense of what kind of roster a layout should have.
The "fuel cars", gondolas and tank cars, could have their numbers tweaked around depending on the specifics of your road. For example, if your road used all oil burning locomotives and it serviced no mines, the 5 gondolas could be swapped with 3 tank cars and maybe 2 extra specialty cars.
If you'd like to mess around with this for your own layout, I've created a spreadsheet that has all these numbers PLUS it has the calculator I used here. Just give it the unique number of car spots (in orange, on the right) and it will calculate the average roster for that size layout. It's a Google docs spreadsheet so no software is required: Car Roster Calculator.
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