Re: House tracks

Where I come from on the Coast Division of the SP in the early 1960's, what you are describing as house tracks would be known as yard tracks, or leads, or drill tracks or something like that. But not house tracks. But Lord knows what terminology folks on the PRR in Camden, NJ might have used.
In our area a "house" track (which might or might not also be a team track) was typically not used for switching of cars, because usually it had something spotted on it that was going sit there for awhile, like a car being unloaded, a bad order, or maybe a company material car. It was a place where you put stuff to get it out of the way. Its location and configuration usually but not always had something to do with the location of an old freight house that might be long gone. But every rule has its exceptions, and the variations were endless.
I'm beating this to death because this is one of those interesting (to me) "dark corners" of railway preservation. Like documenting the difference between a class light and a marker light. Or the use of flags, etc. etc. There is a lot of "trivia" that risks getting lost in the mists of time because it was people oriented and the people are harder to preserve than the machines. Whether it's important or not is a whole different subject, but as an "old timer" it fascinates me to hear terminology used so differently than from what I remember 40 years ago. But the differences can also be geographic as well as time related.
Old Fart West