7 miles and a ferry...

The Société du port ferroviaire de Baie-Comeau (SOPOR) operate 7 miles of disconnected rail line on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence seaway in Northern Quebec...

Photo from Sopor’s official Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/soporbc/)

The non-profit organisation serve several customers including the Alcoa aluminium plant, as well as timber and pulp wood, and connect to mainland North America via a dedicated ferry from Matane in Atlantic Canada. The 26 car capacity ‘Georges-Alexandre-Lebel’ sails 7 days a week all year round. The port at Baie-Comeau is, as Chris has pointed out, built on a narrow shelf of land a long side the sea way, 

Their corporate video shows the extent of operations and their ex GTW GP38 in operation along with the ferry...

The compact nature of the operation, alongside the attraction of the ferry, make it an excellent prototype for a shelf layout in H0, or perhaps a slightly larger N gauge affair. My initial draw was the ferry operation at Baie Comeau, I figured the operation of sorting cars for loading, based upon weight to get an even distribution on the ferry, as they arrive from various industries or are loaded at the trans load facility right next to the ferry. The ferry is unloaded and the arrivals placed in the yard whilst the ferry is loaded ready for its next journey. The arrivals are then sorted and switched to their customers. 

This could be compressed and cropped to fit an L shape location as shown in the first scheme. The length of the sidings determined by your available space. I think the minimum for meaningful operation would be a ferry large enough for 6 60ft cars, although 4 could be done at a push. The locomotive could be anything you desire, but SOPORs ex CN GP9RM would be my choice, if I was modelling the project. Traffic includes boxcars, pulp wood cars, flat cars, container flats and tank cars... all readily available in H0 (as well as N).

Representing the typical British space starved modeller, I wondered if an even more compact shelf layout might be possible and I looked to the Alcoa plant where ingots are loaded onto flat cars, the small yard here might be a neat little model, and not a straight forward switch with cars on both sidings needing to be moved to the main for shunting back to the ferry before being replaced with empties. I feel this probably has more to give, and I’ll expect I’ll revisit this, I’m also considering there may be an opportunity here for a freelance scheme, based on the same concept and traffic but perhaps altering the geometry to better suit your space. However, the process of design is one I very much enjoy, taking a prototype and analysing its character and traffic, then applying some artistic interpretation and layout design filters to generate a pleasing composition. At the very least, hopefully it’s brought this interesting operation some more exposure..,

In the meantime, if you’ve got a layout in mind but need some help with bringing the ideas to a realisable scheme then get in touch for a personal proposal. More soon...