More Operational Interest with the Hospital Train

The hospital train pulls into the yard.

Earlier this month, I wrote about adding a hospital train to the Manitoba & Minnesota Sub.--a train made up of locomotives and rolling stock headed for repair, to museums or to the scrapper.

At first, the train just made a regular appearance on the layout, passing through from east to west. Then I realized I could do more with it--give it more operational value.

It drops off the items for the museum.

As I wrote about earlier, I added a railway museum to the town of Turney on the upper level. The former freight house is home to a collection of railway ephemera, including an old caboose, and SD40-2 (in classic maroon and grey), a 40-foot boxcar and an old passenger car. (A different assortment than that featured in the original post.)

When I made up the hospital train, I took those items from the museum and added them to the train. They looked good running across the layout. But then I thought: Why not have them yarded in Fort Frances and then brought up to Turney by a special movement? And that's what I did.

A special movement takes them west.

Now when the hospital train makes its appearance, we can go back in time like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day,, repeating that day when the various railway items were brought to the museum over and over again.

Almost there . . . .

Yarding the items bound for the museum adds another operational event to the layout--although I have no way of replicating the "big hook" moving the cars and locomotive from the siding to the museum trackage. That's what hands are for!

In the siding awaiting the crane to
move them to the museum track.