Some interesting stuff here. Speaking of grain elevator placement. When I stared out my grade school window growing up in St Louis Park Mn, I always looked at the Nordic Ware tower across Highway 100 and always wondered what it was.
It wasn’t till many years later I learned it was the historic Peavey Haglin experimental grain elevator. First-of-its-kind that made History and would advance through time to become the Magnificent grain elevators we have today.
Images from St Louis Park Historical Society.
There is a lot of interesting information available about this historic experimental grain elevator through the St Louis Park Historical Society.
Wikipedia describes how this structure was erected using a cylindrical form that was raised to each new height after the concrete cured in the lower section. Modern building elevator shafts are constructed in the same way to this day. A type of “fly form” although it doesn’t need to fly as the floor forms do.
Great post, connects the wooden to the modern unit train loading elevator complexes nicely.
I would suggest that the lower spout is the suitable height to load through the typical grain boxcar door. When hoppers finally became accepted, most grain elevators had to be modified with an additional higher spout due to the higher top loading method. Once boxcars became obsolete in this traffic, the lower spout was no longer needed and the attached flexible hose removed…
Chris, I don’t know if you’ve found the answers you were seeking but, depending on how much you were interested in grain handling and granger railroading, I would like to suggest a couple of books you may find interesting and helpful. They are published by the Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modeling Society Inc. (www.sfrhms.org). The first is “The Santa Fe and Grain Story” which is just what title says. Anything and everything about the Santa Fe and grain including track layouts of elevators, and towns of all sizes as well as information on operations and rolling stock used, is there, in words and photographs: ISBN 978-1-933587-36-3.
The other title is “Santa Fe on the Great Plains: The Photography of Lee Berglund”. As this title suggests, this is a photographic essay of ATSF lines in the agricultural region of the Great Plains, focusing on grain and livestock, as well as the movement of other freight and passenger traffic in the region. This book is almost all color spanning from the 1960s to the late 1990s. ISBN 978-1-933587-34-9
I find prairie sentinels fascinating. A shame most -if not all have gone ot seems.
I built one a few years ago out of treated lumber which is usually decking. It sits alongside a siding on my garden railway. The Canadian film mentioned in a previous post gave me the idea and the film is something I enjoy watching from time to time.
The elevator is one of a few uniqure North American structures on my RR. The others are a cover bridge, based on one at Cedarburg WI, the school house at Waubeka WI (of Flag Day fame) and a Pennsy barn.