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A Balloon loop is a track arrangement that allows a train to reverse direction, and return to where it came from, without having to shunt or even to stop.
 Double sided island platform Track diagram of railway station at Olympic Park, Sydney. ...
Track diagram of railway station at Olympic Park, Sydney. ...
Use Balloon loops can be useful for passenger trains, and unit freight trains, such as coal trains.
Balloon loops do not include track layouts where combinations of junctions allow a train reversal, where this reversal is not regularly used.
In some transport simulators (eg: Transport Tycoon Deluxe, 1996 but still played worldwide), Balloon Loops are refered to as RoRo stations or Roll On, Roll Out. They are frequently used at busy stations. Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe are computer games where the player is in control of a transport company, and must compete with rival companies to make as much profit as possible, by transporting passengers and various goods by road, rail, sea or by air. ...
Examples
Passenger The Olympic Park railway station in Sydney serves the sportsgrounds and stadiums in the Homebush Bay area. ...
Freight
New South Wales - Newnes Junction coal loader -
- Mount Thorley - coal
- Camberwell - coal
- Ulan - coal
- Penny Road - wheat
- Fassifern - has triangle as well, so trains can go north or south.
- Vales Point
- Newdell Junction
Camberwell is a district of London 2. ...
Ulan is the sister of Astro Boy. ...
History Balloon loops first appeared in large numbers in the 1960s when the modernising British Rail introduced so-called merry-go-round coal trains that operated without shunting from mines to power stations and back again, around the clock. The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ...
Logo of British Rail British Railways (BR), later rebranded as British Rail, ran the British railway system from the nationalisation of the Big Four British railway companies in 1948 until its privatisation in stages between 1994 and 1997. ...
Disadvantages The only real disadvantage of a balloon loop is that it needs a lot of space to build, and even so, the curves can be very sharp. The very sharp 180 m radius curves on the Olympic Park balloon loop cause noise, wear and tear on both the wheels and rails. The Olympic Park railway station in Sydney serves the sportsgrounds and stadiums in the Homebush Bay area. ...
Advantages The advantages of a balloon loop include - - smooth operation.
- trains can arrive in any free platform, while another train is leaving any platform.
If Olympic Park station were not on a balloon loop and were a stub platform: - more tracks and platforms would be required.
- arrivals into some platforms could block departures from other platforms.
- time would be lost while drivers change ends and reset the train for the other direction.
- if the driver changed ends and discovered a hidden fault, then delays to trains would be likely.
Other Olympic stations - The Olympic station at Berlin, Germany has two through platforms and about 8 turnback platforms. This is considerably more than the 2 track / 4 platform arrangement at Sydney.
Berlin? (pronounced: , German ) is the capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,426,000 inhabitants (as of January 2005); down from 4. ...
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