I have a Walthers Valley Cement kit waiting to be added to my layout. Here’s my situation: it’ll go onto an area that’s very tight on space, and I’ll only have enough capacity for 5-6 covered hoppers at a time. All the prototype cement plants I’ve seen are huge and rival steel mills in terms of the real estate they occupy; for this reason I want to try modeling someplace on the other end of a cement hopper’s journey, like maybe a distribution center.
What I’d like to know is, where exactly do these cement hoppers go with their loads [other than seaports]? All of the retail/ready-mix facilities I’ve seen nowadays receive their shipments by truck, not by rail. If anybody could enlighten me on this I’d be much obliged…
In Cedar Rapids Iowa we have a facility that receives carloads of cement and reloads the cement into semi trucks for delivery to the batch plants. I think most of the cement comes from the Mason City area by rail. The facility has 2 tracks and can probably hold 10 to 12 of the short cement hopper cars. They have a small car mover to move the cars around. The facility is basically a concrete block building that has 2 large silos on top to to hold the cement. The semi trucks drive though to load and it also appear they can bag the cement and sometimes send out pallets of bagged cement.
There is a similary facility in Des Moines that seems to get cement off the BNSF.
Something like this could be represented in a resonable amount of space.
Heres a few shots of one in NC. I use to go there quite a bit to see some NS. That cement plant only holds about 2-3 cars. The rail line leads to a fiberglass plant (PPG). I was also told that the plant has one of NC biggest turn arounds in the facility for the engines.
This cement place had the cement mixers and a few trucks. I am sure some of the hoppers were carrying sand, or what not.
I’m sorry i don’t have good shots of it. When I was in NC to visit i just got the train cars.
A friend “across the street” found me an ariel view of a 4-silo facility using Live Search Maps. Looks similar to the Medusa Cement kit - I think there’s a set of these silos in the Valley Cement kit also.
Those silos don’t look like they are used to handle cement powder. Cement silos usually have a bag house up on top to filter the air that is used to push the cement into the silo. The Valley Cement plant has a bag house on top of the silos.
The Walthers Valley Cement is a very small version of a typical cement ‘production’ facility. Raw limestone is burned into calcium oxide in that rotating brown ‘kiln’. It is mixed with clay, old tires, coal and even fired with gas. The burned result travels down the kiln and is processed into cement, It is then shipped in bulk(100 ton two bay covered hoppers), or bagged and shipped by rail or truck.
So, you can have inbound loads of limestone rock/tires/ fuel oil/coke, and ship either bagged or bulk cement.
As far as a distribution center - cement used to be shipped in about a 400 mile radius. As you have found, it has gone ‘big time’ and now we are seeing large trainloads shipped for sea transport as well. I would thing something like the Medusa Cement facility from Walthers would be good. Just make sure you can truck 500-600 tons a day away based on your 5-6 carloads a day of delivery!
edit 7-5-17 Google maps The plant is gone but can see where it was S of Freeway ( 305/BR 80/50) between S River Road and River. Still shows on Maps Live .
DS - those are excellent pix of RMC Cemex, thanks for sharing them
Don - excellent collection of cement industry factoids!
Jim, I probably should have gone with the Medusa kit from the beginning,
now that I’ve discovered my usable real estate in the target area is even narrower than I first believed.
But I bought the Valley Cement kit a year ago because I suspected it would be retired, and that is
indeed what happened.
I’ll probably scratchbuild a set of silos myself to use as a distrib center, to avoid breaking the shrink wrap
on the Valley Cement box - then I put the VC kit up for sale on the 'bay.
