I don’t recall why a former me decided to leave the stock spur as a short stub. I’m sure it seemed reasonable at the time. Maybe I planned to build a stock pen together with the spur. In any event that part of the layout has been a piece of 12 mm foam core for years.
In preparation for the layout tour, and now that the pasture is finalized, I’ve decided to find a scrap of 1/2” ply and get it ready for track. The marsh at the end of the pasture continues onto this piece of plywood, and beneath the spur into the drainage ditches on either side of the siding and main track. From there it will flow down the bank behind the roundhouse and into the Muskrat River.
I routed out the marsh area, which is going to be filled with bull rushes, as well as a channel beneath the spur itself. The channel is narrow enough to be bridged by a few timbers on wooden piers on either bank.
The stock pens at Pembroke were an overwhelming 80×90 feet, with two ramps. That would extend well into the pasture. So, in my version of Pembroke, they will be replaced with a single ramp, and the fenced area will be grassed like the pasture. Stock shipments would have been relatively rare (indeed, one historian believes they were unlikely, even though the very first loads shipped from Pembroke were cattle), and a farmer might have waited until the cars were in place before driving their animals to the pen.
Pembroke:87 