Im building my second layout and plan to have lots of industries through out, This may seem a dumb question but I need to know How our trains carry supplies from point a to point b!
eg Does a train bring logs/timber from a forest to a timber mill then from the timber mill to local timber yard ? OR does timber go straight from the mill to the local industries(eg) furniture plant
eg gravel, does it come straight from a gravel company to a local supply shop then to the factories?
How do all these work
Where does deisel come from?
Oil , coal, gas, diesel, sand, How does that all work?
Who brings what to the cement plant?
Im kind of lost and have spent days trying to find this info on the net but havent found anything i understand so as always the best source of info is right here
also i dont know how to design my tracks for sevicing these industries , how the trains come off the main line etc
Does anyone have a track plan for their industries they can post here .I would be very gratefulfor any feedback and ideas
Like the classic question ‘How big is a Dog’ - It all depends! Here are some basics:
Timber/Lumber - Back in steam days, many times a logging operator would have a small railroad that would wind around/through the logging area to move timber from the forest to the saw mill. These were usually temperary tracks and the entire ‘railroad’ many times was moved to a new logging location or sold to another logging operator. It was rare for a common carrier railroad to be involved,but it may have happened. Once the lumber was milled, it would be delivered to either a local furniture company(wagon or truck), or shipped by rail if the distance justified it.
Gravel - Most aggragate is mined and used locally. Much of it is shipped by truck. Rail shipment of this heavy/low value product is usually limited to ballast(railroad service) or specialty items like ‘frac’ sand. Sometimes one will still see large granite or limestore slabs shipped via rail.
Petroleum - Most arrives via pipeline, unless there is no direct pipelines(like in the Bakken Shale Reserve oil moving by rail to refineries). Refined petroleum moved via pipelines and truck. Rail sipments to local bulk oil compaines have decreased in the ‘Modern Era’. There are still tank cars of heating oil moving to New England dealers.
Cement - Cement used to be shipped ‘bagged’ and in box cars. Covered hoppers are used today for bulk movement. Most cement rail moved cement traffic is limited to a 400-500 mile radius of the cement source. There are exceptions, but this is typical. Bagged cement is still moved in box cars, and this is what you buy at your builders supply or ‘Big Box’ home improvement center. Bagged cement products usually move from the distributor to a place like H
In some ways the answer will depend on what era you are modeling. In modern times (say post steam era) most industry to industry shipping would be long distance rather than on the distance covered by a layout. That is, you’d be unlikely to have two businesses that close to each other shipping by rail. IE the gravel pit would use truck to ship to the concrete plant.
Now to some of your specific examples. To use the sawmill example, in classic logging RR era, you would have trains pick up the logs from a yarding location, carry the logs to a mill which would in turn ship lumber via railroad. However they are likely to be two different railroads. One would be the logging (perhaps narrow gauge) railroad, while the other would be one of the bigger carriers for the era. In today’s terms you might have woodchips picked up for the NS and shipped to a paper mill a hundred miles away, but only the largest home layouts have room for both ends of that operation.
For coal, oil, gas, etc, the answer again depends on era. Historically every town had several small oil and/or coal yards that received coal or oil, and just about every large industry would receive coal for the boilers, not to mention the big power plants. But most of that carload shipping dropped after the 70s.
Kalmbach has published several (I think 4) books on this topic, Guide to Industries series. You can look them up on the book store section of this site or try your local library (if they don’t have them as for an interlibrary load). I believe these books cover each of the industries you mentioned above in great detail.
John Armstrong wrote what many modelers consider the standard book for how traffic flows on a railroad and how to incorporate it into our layouts. The 4 industries books published by Kalmbach are also good references for specific industries. Check your library.
The era and location you model will determine the specifics of how industries worked. In the early days, rail cars were very generic–boxcar, flatcar, gondola–and over time they became more specialized. Industry started out smaller and more reliant on manpower. Over time bigger and more powerful machinery came into use. Industry also started out serving local areas but evolved to serve wider areas.
Oil - when oil is first discovered in an area railroads are usually the first to carry it, unless modelling the modern era in which case isolated wells would be served by trucks. If there is enough oil in a region to justify it, a pipeline will eventually be built. Pipelines are much more efficient than trucks and railcars but are very expensive to build. Oil was generally shipped by rail prior to the 1950. After that pipelines dominated the shipment of oil and rail shipment was the exception. With the new oilfields in S. Texas and North Dakota, railroads have come back into the picture while oil companies are waiting to build pipelines.
Gravel - is usually mined as close to the end user as possible. Sometimes it will be shipped several hundred miles if there are no local sources where it is needed. This can happend if a region outgrows its local sources of gravel and aggregates.
Cement plants - usually located close to a quarry to mine the limestone which is the basic component of cement. Railcars might bring in coal or oil to fire the kilns and the plant’s power generators. Railcars would also bring in clay and blast furnace slag to mix with the local limestone. Shipments out would be of finished cement in bags or bulk. After the 1950s specialized covered hopper c
In the overall scheme of things, all cars go through a classification yard. A local train would start at a yard with a string of cars to be taken to industries on the trains route. As they make their way along the line, they would set out and pick up cars as required. Then the train would return to the yard. The cars would then be sorted or classified and put on tracks for the next train and route that it runs, which may or may not be the same route where the cars came from originally. So if the train picked up a load of lumber from the saw mill (on route one) and it was to go to the furniture factory (via route two), the car would go to the yard and be set out on a yard track for route two and the train that would pick it up and take it to the furniture factory.
Normally cars don’t go from one industry directly to another industry on the same train. But for our modeling purposes, some layouts may not have room for a yard. So in that case, the car would be moved from one industry to the next on the same train.
Here in Richardton, interests are building a new 400 acre industrial park adjacent to the Red Trail Ethanol Plant.
So on just a short stretch of BNSF mane Lion we have:
Hebron : A brick plant, trucks in local clays ships by truck and rail speciality brick products in specified colors, sizes and textures.
Hebron : A new grain shipping depot built by Asian interests. Grain arrives from local farms by truck is shipped by rail west to the ports.
Ricahrdton : The Ethanol plant. Corn comes in by truck or rail, but more and more of it is arriving by truck since more and more farmers are growing product for this market.* Gaoline (used for denaturing the product) comes in by truck. Were it not denatured, the ethanol would come under the laws pertaining to the production, sale and distribution of alcohol. Outbound products include Ethanol with almost always goes by rail, but some is delivered to nearby gas stations by truck. Other outbound product includes Brewers Yeast which is used as cattle feed. Wet Brewers Yeast is transported by trucks to local farms, Twice Dried brewers yeast is shipped by rail, perhaps to a formulator of feed product.
Richardton : A new industrial park will have facilities for receiving oil field products and equipment and trans loading them to trucks for distribution in the oil fields. There will also be rail car cleaning and repair facilities, and that might be an interesting industry for a model railroad, because any sort of a car might arrive for cleaning and repairs. Some grain cars must be “certified” as being cleaned before they can pick up grain for export. (Domestic grain can be cleaned at the receiving industry.) Richardton is looking at 200 new jobs with this new rail yard.
Gladstone : A large grain depot. All of those little grain elevators in all of the little towns have given way to this big industrial grain elevator. When it was first built 30 years ago it had four siloes. Now it has 24. Grain, of course arrives by truck, i
The first rule in freight mode selection is cost, second is access. That said, I will help with a few more examples from my own industrial experience. Worked in several chemical plants producing agricultural chemicals and industrical chemicals. The chemical industry still relies on rail shipments for both inbound raw materials and finished product. The finished products are either going to other chemical producers or to a final customer. One plant I worked in had three primary rail spurs which served an anhydrous ammonia plant for finished product shipment, a raw material herbicide plant that made the active ingredients and received several raw materials in tank cars. Two additional plants formulated herbicides for end use and received raw material clay in covered hopper cars and shipped product in 50 lb. bags in both rail box cars and dry van semi-trailers. The other formulated plant received raw material solvent in rail cars, received 5 gallon metal pails in rail box cars and sent product out in both box cars and semi-trailers including refrigerated/heated trailers and box cars. This particular plant also hosted a large plastics plant and received raw materials in barge loads but was also set up to receive the same materials in tank cars. It also received butadiene rubber in box cars and semi-trailer dry vans. The product was shipped in bulk hopper cars and bulk semi-hopper trailers. I have often thought that a chemical manufacturing plant would be a good layout industry. Many years ago I had a coworker who built a model of our plant to be served by his Union Pacific HO layout. Not prototypical as the plant was service by the bankrupt Rock Island RR when we were working at this location.
Another industry that utilizes rail transportation is the brewing industry. Model Railroad has had several good article on modeling the brewing industry. Grain comes in in covered hoppers, containers come in and go out in
As you’re already been told, the answers will vary a lot. Some of it is era or region dependent. I can give examples from my area. Note that rail customers are usually a long way from the industry. Shorter hauls are handled by truck.
Today, and for several decades before, most logs arrive at mills by truck. Different mills produce different products, and they may be shipped to different parts of the distribution chain depending on the customer.
A mill may specialize in plywood, particle board, engineered I beams, roof trusses, and/or oriented strand board. It may ship no dimensional lumber at all, or it may do nothing but. It may be species specific (e.g. ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, redwood, oak or whatever). Lumber may be intended solely for framing, or maybe it’s for furniture production. By-products like sawdust or wood chips may also be shipped by rail to other industries producing pulp, paper or other stuff.
A mill producing dimensional lumber could ship some in boxcars and more on flats depending on the customer. Some customers may be distribution centers, which would then truck product to retailers. Some retailers may receive shipments directly. My hometown had a large lumberyard that received boxcar loads at a team track dock, until the last decade or so. They unloaded with a fork truck and it went directly to the store - at one time the store was across the street from the team track and fork trucks were flagged across the street. After the store moved a mile or so away, lumber was transferred to a truck first.
Crude oil arrives at refineries via pipeline, and refined product is truc
Trains depart the 242nd Street Terminal every 5 minutes.
Passengers can get on and off of trains by themselves.
The only switching occurs at the 242nd Street Terminal (except for equipment moves or work trains).
242nd Street is a two track terminal, and during rush hour I only use the number 2 track unless that track is occupied when the next train arrives at the terminal.
Trains are operated by LPP in the cabs. They do what they are told to do. The tower operator (me) controls the railroad not the individual trains which run on their own without the master’s intervention.
Freight? What is THAT? No freight runs on our subway layout.
We had a thread a few months ago where we discussed how we, as modelers, dealt with sources and destination for cargo. It seemed to me that very little of our traffic goes from industry to industry on our layouts. Instead, it goes from staging to industry and from industry to staging.
Even in the steam era, this makes sense. Our layouts represent small places, really. It would make very little sense to load a boxcar on one side of town and take it to the other side of town. That’s a job for a truck.
I’ve only got one industry-to-industry link. I have a meat packing plant and a tannery. The hides go from one to the other.
I’ve got 2 pseudo-industries. The icing platform services the reefers from other industries, and can even take care of “through trains” that don’t stop anywhere else. The carfloat serves as staging, but it’s operational as well and can be a source or destination for freight traffic.