What, if anything, has railroad preservation devoted to classification yards?

Photo attached from 1960 General Railway Signal advertisement.

John

I can just see IRM installing a full hump yard....

uhm..well...<--->

They have a storage yard for their freight cars.
I'm hearing some hump yards are opting out for level classification.

IRM could set up a classification demonstration, kicking a car or 2, maybe a trailing kick into a turnout.

Maybe they can build a model form in their new model railroad building, I built one years ago in HO, but decided against modeling one later. Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago had one on thier O gauge layout, I never saw it run when I was there but presumably it was automatic, thats gone now with an HO layout, no hump yard as far as I know.

I’m a big fan of live demonstrations, but I think the best way to interpret classification yards is through scale models and/or audio/visuals. There are some good videos out there showing these operations. I don’t have any real exposure to hump yards, but I literally grew up with kicking cars. I would be hesitant demonstrating the kick especially with vintage equipment and even more so with a “trailing kick”. What’s next, the push pole?

IRM has had, for years, a rule prohibiting kicking cars; everything has to be ridden to rest. The reason is two fold: 1) antique draft gears are hard to find replacements for, and 2) any place open to the public is just asking to have a kid run onto the track, or clueless people bumbling around while chatting on their phones. At least when coupled, the guy protecting the shove has half a chance at getting it stopped. Not to say it hasn't been tried from time to time, and yes, I can attest it does cause damage.

Anyway, kicking a car or two really isn't illustrating what a class yard does; any of the How a Railroad Works promotional films available on youtube would do a much better job.

In addition to audio-visuals one piece of hardware that would help to explain how class yards work would be one of the manual control desks, which every hump had before computers took over the routing tasks. In many instances the desks were left in place as a back-up when the computer had a bad hair day.

If you really wanted to show how dangerous every day work use to be, build a manual hump. And use an old boxcar that had the handbrake on top and have a volunteer with a brake club ride it down and get it slowed down before hitting a cut of cars to hard.

Don't forget to jump up in the air at the moment of coupling....