Hi everyone and happy Friday. Since the birth of my MR I have wanted to have a brewery on it along with my coal and lumber yard operations. Coal and Lumber are very common and I have tons of pics of that, but what I don’t have is any of a brewery. I have the building but I’m not sure how to scenic it or what supplies are brought in by rail. I suppose hops and barely are brought in via covered hoppers, but what else? Is there anything outbound, besides beer, that might go in tankers? Like post brewing sludge? I suppose regular box cars would deliver other beer making supplies and possibly a flat car full of lumber if they made their own barrels. But what else? Where can I find rail operations for brewerys??
How about some ideas folks, and what the heck, it Friday so if you go some pics that would beer great too.
I should have done a search first. Found the post from Space Mouse about staging and the brewery. And I’m sure I can find some info on rail service to this industry, but I could still use some pics!!!
Maybe on Sunday I will take an afternoon ride on the Victory down to Burlington Iowa, and take some pics of the old brewery down there. I have been wanting to model it anyway, so this is my reason to get down there and get the pics I need.
I do not believe that the brewery is in operation anymore, but it is a really cool historic building.
I googled a brewery here in Canada, Molsons. Clicked the images tab and found a few…
A similar search for “Coors Brewery” who bought up a bunch of Molsons shares a while back, brought similar results in google images. Hope these are useful.
This probably isn’t much help, but it’s a start. I bought Walthers’ “Arrowhead Ale” kit, which is a 1-inch deep background flat. I made up my own decals for the Strumpet Brewery, and painted the whole thing. The figures, sacks and barrels were things I had left over from The Wonder Years.
I was at a show and found a Preiser set of Kegs and Barrels. A bit pricey, but there are a lot of individual items in the box.
Every brewery I have seen with the exception of microbreweries is a fairly tall building. I suppose this has something to do with gravity and moving product down rather than horizontal. The bigger ones have silos for storage and as I recall they have all been concrete. The Walthers ADM silos would be a good start with a large building next to them for processing. Don’t forget box or refrigerated box cars for shipment also.
In real life, large breweries receive a variety of commodities and some ship beer by rail. Real-life railroader Mike Osborne (SP/UP conductor) wrote an interesting article on the job that serves the Budweiser brewery in Van Nuys, CA in Layout Design News#20 (Summer 1998) published by the Layout Design Special Interest Group. The brewery receives hops, malt, rice, and grits; diatomaceous earth (for filtering); beechwood; and shipping materials (kegs, pallets, bottles). The finished beer is also shipped by rail. (When “Ice Beer” was being made, the brewery also received CO2 in tankcars.)
Mike explained the work at the industry and described a couple of ways to model it. Based on his article, I designed an ultra compact version of the brewery that fit on a roughly 1 foot X 4 foot T-TRAK module (N scale) for a client.
This is obviously very compressed, but offers spots for all the commodities. This module, along with the accompanying yard module, are described here. Together, the two modules made for a fun little operating layout for a couple of crews, inspired by the prototype, in about 8 square feet.
Breweries have been a popular model railroad subject forever, if one looks back at old magazine articles. It turns out that the larger ones really are interesting rail-served industries. Modern breweries do look much like other large industrial buildings. But the older breweries were often structures that were meant to suggest an old-world heritage, so they are a good place for those European model kits on a US layout!
In the Transition Era and before, there’s another thing you can factor in - icing the reefers. The old ice-bunker refrigerator cars, which were in service before mechanical cooling became commonplace, were kept cold with ice loaded through roof-top hatches. So, before you bring the cars to the brewery for loading, you can make a stop at an ice house to chill them down. An ice house, of course, can service reefers for produce or meat plants, and can even take care of through traffic which isn’t loading or unloading, but just needs to be refreshed.
I am surprised that after pasteurization was used that beer was normally iced while transported. I thought that refrigerator cars were sometimes used for their insulative values for carrying liquid/canned goods to protect them from extreme heat and cold. Also, I would think that heater service for such goods would be essential under certain climatic conditions, but it is hard for me to imagine icing.
Let me quote from Signature Press’s book Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd Edition, page 375:
“Beverages and canned goods were also carried by PFE. Not only were western products moved east, but canned items, especially beer, provided ideal backhaul tonnage from eastern or midwestern breweries and canneries. These carloads would amount to between 25,000 and 30,000 shipments annually during the 1940’s and 1950’s sic. Such shipments were not usually refrigerated, merely requiring an insulated freight car to avoid temperature extremes.”
Trivia for the moment: common dandelions raised as salad greens were shipped Februarys from the Imperial Valley of California, up to 50 carloads annually.
I found the Kalmbach pub “Industries Along the Tracks 2” to have a very good section on brewerys. Not only the history, but a chart showing what kind of traffic would be generated by brewerys in different years - you can adjust the output for your own road. And a lot of good pictures, of course.
I’m planning to include a brewery in the next phase of my layout, the old Queen City Brewery in Cumberland, Maryland. It was just north of the WM station, and occupied a fairly compact piece of land between the WM main and Wills Creek. Breweries were typically set up in three main sections, inbound storage, brewing, and bottling/distribution.
Here’s the late, great National Brewing Company at O’Donnell and Conkling Streets in east Baltimore… Regrettably, the onerous taxes levied by the city and state have all but killed the brewing industry in Baltimore… but that’s another story… This has now been re-developed into “Brewer’s Hill” and turned into offices and condos… It was a very compact operation, and is therefore eminently model-able…
The tall brick structure in the middle was the main brew house. The small, older brick building behind it was an older brew house. Directly behind that you see a driveway. This is where the railroad spur entered the brewery from the south. If you scroll down the map to the bottom, you can see a remnant of the railroad track, and the abandoned right of way it originated from.
You’ll also note that the structure to the left of the track south of the National Brewery was also a brewery, originally Gunther’s, later Hamms, and finally Schaeffer before the tax man shut that one down, too.
Anyway, where you now see a parking lot behind the National brew house, was the grain storage and unloaders. Covered hoppers would be shoved into what was then an alley, and unloaded into some silos. There was elevator equipment that carried the grain from the silos up to the top of the brew house, where it woul
