I’m trying to figure out how to fill a 12x16" area for servicing perishables and farm equipment in rural VA during the 1980s. What structures, beside the Walthers State Line Farm Supply to include? I looked online at various areas in Southern Va and didn’t really see anything except warehouses.
TIA!
~Lee
You could look at Pikestuff buildings. They look very much like the buildings I saw growing up in South Georgia and they are easily kitbashed if you want something different
Pole barns would be very appropriate. Dowels and corrugated sheets. Dull silver paint. The farm I grew up on had more of these than anything. Market properties also.
Pole barns. Don’t limit yourself to silver, they came in all kinds of colors even back then. I have 2 pole buildings on my property that date back to the late 70s. One is light blue and the other is yellow. The siding on the Pikestuff buildings is closer to the steel siding on a pole building then the corrugated steel that is used on roofs and older buildings.
There are all sorts of variations, lean to type roofs, peaked roofs, peaked roofs with overhangs to park equipment under. Some were open on one side, most in this area have large sliding doors 16’ or so and not overhead doors. They are used for everything from machine sheds, barns, workshops, milking houses…
Sounds like a sorta improbable mix of industries and era to be rail served. Are you modeling after an actual industry?
I would think a rural setting would mean it would be shipping perishables out, so it would have to have some sort of packing shed or warehouse that would load into trucks. It might have some sort of pole barn associated with it as a garage to service whatever farm equipment brought the perishables into the packing operation.
There’s pole barns and then there’s metal pre-fab buildings. These can take form very similar to pole barns, but others look more like Quonset huts, but bigger.
Inputs could include both fertilizer and ammonia, plus fuel was also commonly handled by coop-type ag supply dealers. If you have a dead-end siding, a ramp for unloading farm equipment is another possibility.
The structure you are looking for will probably have to be fabricated, there are no kits that I know of. In any case, a facility like the one you are after is simply a modified truck loading barn where produce was kept for a few hours until it was loaded. Even in the 80’s that kind of structure was probably built back in the 30’s and would be an older archetecture style with modern AC and perhaps updated doors. There is an excellent example of exactly what you are after located in Cape Charles VA on the ESRR right of way. Only recently has it been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. I don’t have a photo handy, but I’ve got a few somewhere. It is simply a small barn with a long extension that has bays on one side for pick up trucks and the other for rail loading. I have been intending to model it myself for my version of the ESRR.
You shouldn’t have any trouble kitbashing or scratching one yourself. Don’t worry so much about appearances, you can take a barn, add a long shed and call it done- it doesn’t matter if it matches or not, most of the real ones didn’t! I would avoid a modern style steel prefab, in rual VA then and now nobody would spring the buck for one of those- at least not when grandad’s shed can still be used! You could also take a newer building and add an older loading dock or vice versa with an old storage unit and a new dock for rail.
When did the 1980s become “back then?” It wasn’t that long ago.
Er, 1980 is 31 years ago.
For comparison, when I was a kid in the 1970s, 30 years ago WWII was raging…
OK, enough off topic, back to loading sheds and pole barns - actually, come to think of it, didn’t produce & fruit shipping by rail sort of reach a nadir in the US during the 1980s - they didn’t really start build new reefers in any numbers till the late 1980s/early 1990s. Not sure where to find good yearly tonnage numbers on the web
1980 was six presidents back. Entire generations of things like locomotives and military aircraft have come and gone since then. People that were young adults then are now becoming grandparents. Its “back then” now.
I’m curious what “perishables” southern VA would have been producing. All I can think of are apples in the northwest.
Not exactly. Most of our first line fighters like the F15, 16 & A10 were designed in the 70s. B52s are still on the flight line. C5 was 1960 vintage. While big GEs & EMD head up a lot of mainline trains, SD40-2s, GP 38s, and 40s are still common. In a train today, I saw several Southern Serves the South boxcars, a Family Lines covered hopper, couple of SCL cars and a Penn Central box. Big hardware doesn’t turn over as fast as computers, so the generations haven’t changed as much as it may seem.
Then and now southern VA produces apples, berries, grapes, melons, peaches, pears, strawberries, nectarines, asparagus, beets, broccoli, cabbage, corn, cucumbers, eggplants, green beans, mixed greens such as spinach and kale, herbs of all kinds, mushrooms, onions, peppers, potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beef, bison, chicken, duck, emu, geese, goat, lamb , pork, rabbit, turkey, peanuts, tobacco, ice cream, milk, eggs and probably more stuff I can’t think of right now. Non perishable agriculture products are such things as cotton, peanut butter and other processed canned or jared foods, Christmas trees, horticulture products like seeds and bedding plants, and that sort of thing. Any of those items would be appropriate for a SVA layout from just about any era.
Any of those products would require fast shipping and should provide the modeler enough leeway to be creative in a track side facility. Not all of them were shipped by rail, but the possibility certainly exis
Suffolk, Virginia, peanut capital. Home of Planter’s Peanuts. Plus all the other stuff mentioned.
FWIW,
Saw this this example of the quonset hut type equipment sheds I mentioned while browsing through the Walthers catalog:
The farms around here in upstate NY either still have the old wooden barns of ages past, if not centuries past for farm equipment storage or have pole barns as mentioned. They can be quite cool, especially in the stone or concrete “basements”.
For something more modern on the farm:
A pole barn is built by driving pole into the ground and putting in crosmembers horizontally over the vertical poles and sheeting over them all and connecting them with corrugated metal siding. As mentioned, they DO come in different colors. Relatively cheap, easy and quick. They have no “basment”.
Also, SHeet metal buildings with metal frames are also popular, like the Pikestuff mentioned.
The problem with pole barns in this instance is the small fact that there were very few, if any, pole barns being used in VA. Even today pole barns are few and far between around here, they are far more popular in northern states. But with that said, there is nobody but you that will notice that small detail if you want to use a pole barn for the application mentioned. “Rustificate” it and call it done.
Ah, Suffolk! I blew up a HMMWV engine in front of the Planter’s one dark and very cold night during a convoy to Ft. Picket. Hmmm, makes me want some peanut soup from the Virginia Diner…