A Model for the Location of a Railroad Classification Yard

The evaluation of alternative locations for an automatic classification yard has become an important problem for railroad managements. Because of the lower classification costs in these yards and the importance of such costs, many railroads have installed these newer facilities. An automatic yard represents an investment of $5,000,000 or more. Hence, the decision to install such a yard and the question regarding its location merit considerable thought and attention. In this paper, a simple model is constructed to aid a railroad management in choosing among alternative locations. This model is being used by one firm, and it should prove useful to many operations researchers interested in the industry. Although it was constructed primarily to deal with the problem of yard location, the model seems sufficiently flexible to deal with other railroad problems. A few of these other problems are also discussed briefly. The plan of the paper is as follows. Sections I and II contain some introductory material concerning freight yards and some definitions of terms. Section III contains a full description of the location problem we consider. Sections IV-VI deal with the model and procedure we propose. Section VII contains a numerical example, and Section VIII contains some concluding remarks.