Model Railroading on the Cheap

     The Yard Master at Yardley Classification yard is fit to be tied. His yard is all jammed up with tractor shipments which have been delayed by the hard winter this year and late spring. These car-loads of various kinds of tractors are all headed to export and are awaiting loading to an oceangoing freight vessel as soon as the port thaws.

     The Yard master has lost 75% of his capacity with all these cars here. It is surprising how many tractor loads that the Y&H handles.  The railroad carries all kinds of bull dozers and farm tractors of major makers like Caterpillar, International Harvester, John Deere, and others.  This delay has the yard master at Yardley in a real mess with hardly enough room to turn around.  He may have to do some of the classification work at the Holden yard nearby. Sorting work is not as comfortable there because the drill lead is shorter and there is no caboose run-around track.

     We HO scale modelers had suffered for several years with hardly any suitable tractors. In the real world many tractor and farm machinery manufacturers ship their wares by rail and still do to this day. Large machines like combine harvesters can hardly be shipped otherwise. The Yardley and Hillton gets no small share of this traffic as seen in this early spring photo.