Planning for General Motors

I’ve talked about how daunting it can be to model an auto assembly plant. They can be massive, sprawling affairs with lots of buildings and scale miles of track. But in this case I got lucky. The way that this plant was laid out made things pretty compact, which definitely worked in my favor.

GM Street Map Overview © B&O Historical Society
Click the image for a larger PDF version

From the Chessie point of view, the schematic at GM was pretty simple, as the image to the right shows. While there’s a ton of track on that page, when you break it down, most of it is yard track. The tracks to the left of the plant are mostly owned by Conrail (Norfolk Southern today). Much of the track to the right of the plant served various non-GM industries and then headed down the Sparrows Point Sub further. So what does that leave?

  • GM Track No 1, which served the “front” of the plant
  • Three tracks that approached the side of the plant directly from the yard. (GM-2, GM-3, and CHEVY 11)
  • A stub track out in the middle of the parking lot, near the auto rack ramp and gate. (I don’t know what it was for, but I included it in my plan, hoping I would find out later what it was they actually used for. If you know, please leave a comment!)
  • Four autorack tacks at the ramp.

All in all, from a pure “number of tracks” point of view, it’s pretty manageable. Given my L-shaped space, I had to fudge a little in order to get the tracks that feed the plant to work in my space. This required moving GM-1 to come off the yard in the same area as the other tracks rather than from the mainline. (This is part of the reason why the layout is the “Monument City Terminal Division” and not the “Sparrows Point Subdivision.”)

Another compromise was in track length. With 2′ x 5′ available for the actual plant, I had a pretty small space to work with. I could probably work in all the car types that served the plant, (and maybe some that didn’t) but I was going to be way light when it came to volume. I simply can’t match the track lengths.

So this was the initial concept for the area that I went with.

Next step: an actual track plan.

BYJoe Parker ON POSTED INGeneral Motors Layout Design Track Plan