What’s Your favorite industry and why?
My favorite Industry are Grain elevators. I love the old wooden buildings standing next to newer steel bins and cement grain bins. Interesting covered Hoppers spotted next to the elevators. The small farming towns nearby with trains rolling through fields of corn, wheat, oats and soybeans.
This is my thoughts. What’s yours?
Medium to large oil refineries. Putting out fuel oils, gasolines, propane, butane, diesel fuels, Lots of tank car types for out going and some for incoming. Some box cars and flats for items to expanding and for repairing the refinery.
Then elevators with large concrete and metal silos. Having attached packing and sorting associated gives both covered grain cars, boxcars and trucks for out going loads. I guess a lot like what I have on my layout.
Food industries because of the variety of cars they take (box, reefer, corn syrup tanks, vegetable oil tanks) and the flexibility they offer with respect to how you can lay out the structure footprint. A close second would be team tracks, again because of the flexibility.
Lance
Visit Miami’s Downtown Spur at www.lancemindheim.com
Long coal drags and the occasional sand and gravel train from the quarry pulled by double headed steam and pushers on the back have got to be my favorite.
While it may not be an industry I can pass a few hours of the day just pushing hoppers across the scale track and sorting by product for outbound trains. Doing one car at a time like the old times is kinda fun.
Pete
The favorite industry on my old East Texas Santa Fe layout was the Dixie Darlin Peanut Butter factory.
I don’t have any pictures-- but I will keep the memory alive by using it as an unmodeled shipper represented by staging, shipping to “The Olde Peanut Butter Waqrehouse” on my Galveston-theme layout, to be bashed from two DPM Goodnight Matress factories…
Prototype at Galveston…
Hey ken, have to agree that refineries are preety cool. thats why i have fertlizer dealerships that recive ammonia in tank cars
Hard rock mining is my favorite. Lots of inputs, remote communities to support, and extensive facilities for processing, often located at a distance and with their own logistics chain all make this an exciting industry. My layout’s operations are based on more energetic than prototype[I] operations to serve mining communities centered around the D&RGW’s Silverton Branch running north from Durango.
Tough call. For visual appeal, I like older feed mills, small oil dealers, and lumberyards. For variety chemical and mineral processing plants (like kaolin) have both visual appeal, process a lot of cars, and a wide variety.
Unfortunately, some of the best industries in terms of cars in and out and variety such as paper mills are too big to model effectively in a small space. Even just a spur to no where representing the plant calls for 20-30 cars in and out. A simply two car spur just doesn’t represent it well.
On a railroad such as mine where a five or six car train is the limit, I tend to stay with small businesses to keep them in proportion to the rest of the railroad.
I like my Walthers Magic Pan Bakery. It is flexible enough to take grain hoppers, box cars, and tankers and it looks very similar to a Kraft foods bakery that gets rail service here in Portland
I 
sawmills and lumber yards. There’s something about the soggy Pacific Northwest, log trucks and center beam flats that really gets me goin’.
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A close second would be the aggregate industry. Gravel plants, 100 ton hoppers and Difcos dumping along the right of way all give me a thrill.
I like cattle. for the variety of scenes, in the field, being milked, milk stops and early containers, creameries and dairy factories. lets not forget the beef industry that gave rise to the terms such as “cow catcher”, “stock yards”, “stock market”, “bullish” to name a few. Upstate NY small farms had to be a mix of many western types not any one thing till much later in the 20Th century.
I can’t say one industry because there are several that I like but,I’ll select one of my favorite types…
Many of you may recall I like boxcars so,one of my favorites is a grocery and restaurant distributor because I can spot several boxcars loaded with can goods,dry goods,paper towels,napkins etc.
gabeusmc: I think mine are grain elevators also. I photographed one in Kent, Michigan that had no less than 5 different types of silos all painted in different colors! I have scratch built a number of grain elevators in N and HO for sale on ebay. They sell well.
LOGGING!!! [:P] [See website link below; no further explanation required]
River barge terminal - functions like a team track (i.e.a general destination and/or source of tank cars, boxcars, hoppers, gondolas, flat cars etc), but also allows the modeling of barges, docks, cranes, pipes, tanks etc.
Smile,
Stein
I’ve got to say that I’m a little torn between grain elevators and power plants. With elevators you’ve got the silos, the rail traffic, the truck traffic, lots of action, with power plants you’ve got the high-wide loads and special moves, and for coal-fired plants, the unit trains of coal inbound with empties outbound, can get pretty hectic moving around.
My favorite industry is - the railroad itself!
I model a rural area which is, by Japanese standards, very sparsely populated. Other than freight houses and the collieries served by my short line, all of the action is purely railroad related. Most freight is simply passing through from staging to staging. Most of what would be local switching involves routing cars to interchange or transloads (with narrow-er gauge connections.)
While I own, and run, a variety of car types, they are all one basic color – black - and not all that visually interesting. Add in that my favorite operating hat is dispatcher…
I do like the idea that will finally shape my collieries - I `minefanned’ the prototypes a half-century ago. Still, they will simply provide traffic, not be an end unto themselves.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - 24/30)
Hey all. Its been interesting reading what peope like. I myself have not started my layout yet but still in the planning phase and still considering what i’m going to have on my layout for Industry’s but i deffinattly want industries that work with each other like a log yard that i can pick up logs at and bring to the mill. I think i would like a concrete plant but not sure what that would go with. so I’m still in the process of thinking and planning
Anyone has more suggestions please let me know of some industries that work together i guess you could call it.
Thanks,
Jeff
Since I model steam and early diesel, I’d have to say the fueling facilities for the servicing terminals. That would include incoming coal, diesel fuel, and sand and outgoing ash. I also like freight depots. Lotsa action - both from train and truck pick ups and drop offs.
Tom
Where can I see a photo?