I have a grain elevator to load the the cover hoppers. I have store’s to sell the bake goods. I have a building to bake the bread, I think? Town has around 40,000 people in my mind and I model HO and I am free lances. In other words I run what I like.
Here a few pictures of the building and spur.
After sitting the building and loading dock on the double spur I saw the problem. How do I unload cover hoppers at the bakery? Loading dock would work for loading trucks to the stores bit worthless for the hoppers.
It is a good sizes building so it could have a mill in it. But where to unload the grain? Do I need a silo, another elevator?
If I took the grain from the hoppers into the building, what should it look like? Back side of the building has no doors or windows at this point. It looks to be a kit bash using Walther’s parts, I bought it this way years ago.
I have a good deal of room to work with.
I like to keep the side next to the double main half way clear so I can do the uncoupling and coupling.
As you are finding, there are several ‘steps’ to getting grain from the fields to bread on the store shelf. Here is a simple ‘all rail’ movement of the product:
Grain Elevator - trucks of grain are delivered from the fields and loaded into those large 3 bay grain hoppers(the ones with the long centerline roof hatches) for shipping to a flour mill.
Flour Mill - Inbound grain arrives in grain hoppers, is ‘milled’ into flour and then loaded into Airslide type covered hoppers for shipment to a large baking plant.
Baking Plant - Inbound flour arrives and is made into bread, It is usually trucked out to the store shelves.
The above steps are rather simple; and there are large integrated plants that receive grain in one end, and ship baked product out the door on the other end. In your case, your structure looks like a baking plant. I would expect to see inbound Airslides of flour and maybe inbound tank cars of corn syrup sweetener(you are making donuts, right?). Maybe you are going to expand your complex and receive raw grain in those grain hoppers - You will need even more silos to hold them, and a plant to mill the grain. Even then, you still may be receiving some milled flour in Airslides.
The key idea here is that you do not have to model the entire food chain on your layout. You do not need that massive Grain Elevator - maybe the loaded grain cars are arriving from another railroad(interchange) or from another part of your vast HO Empire(off-stage).
You could do it the old way, with boxcars. Some railroads still used boxcars for grain into the late 70s/early 80s.
For unloading a covered hopper, you could put them inside a building of sorts. MR had article on a feed mill not too long ago that had a pit with a grate that covered hoppers were spotted and unloaded at. I think some types of covered hoppers can be unloaded with hoses too.
With all those beer cars you could have a brewery instead [:D]
You know, I am starting to get sick about modeling. Good old day if I want to remove some cars from a train and add to another train I just pick them up! But Nooooooooo, not anymore. I have to use another engine and do it the model railroader way? Now I am worried about this? Yep, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker! [%-)]
Jim, I have plenty of 54 foot covered hoppers, around 50 or so. (I told you I am sick) But I have no idea what a Airslide hopper looks like? How do they unload them? Suckson, or dump?
Packer, post one pictuer with a few dozen beer cans and I get pegged for life! [:-^]
Airslide hoppers have an internal perforated liner that is ‘rippled’ by air applied via an air hose. This keeps the flour load from caking and clogging as it is dumped. There are also PD(Pressure Differential) covered hoppers that use air as well. I know Walther has a nice 50’ Airslide(70’s and newer), and Eastern Car Works has a 40’ Airslide(60’s) and a 2600 cubic foot Dry Flo kit. Walthers also has marketed a nice PD(Pressure Differential) covered hopper at one time.
As Jim notes, it’s not necessary to model the entire industry from field to table. In fact, in most cases it’s better to not do so. We all have only so much real estate (usually not enough) on our layouts for modelling industries. If you model the entire manufacturing process, from raw material, through processing and to the finished product, much of your space will be devoted to servicing only one industry and often a very limited range of rolling stock - a covered hopper moving from building to building to building doesn’t offer much variety. Instead, originate (or terminate) the traffic “offline” in staging or an imagined “other railroad”. You could model one of the steps in the manufacturing process, then send the product “elsewhere” for further processing or distribution. You could also choose to model none of the industrial process, simply receiving carloads from a connecting railroad and passing them on to another connecting railroad at another city or terminal. This frees-up some of that valuable real estate for modelling parts of other industries: perhaps something shipping in boxcars, or on flatcars. They could receive raw materials from a modelled source elsewhere, or from an unmodelled source, represented by staging. By not modelling all of the steps required to make a product, you’ll be able to run more trains, from more different industries, and use a wider variety of cars at the same time. Interchange, as represented by a staging yard (or even a single staging track) can generate lots more traffic than can the few industries which we have room to model fully.
Thanks for the answers. I guess I could pick up the hoppers at the elevator and take them to the yard like I am doing now. Then grab a couple of box cars and take them to the per-posed bakery. But it all so sort of defeats what I am trying to do.
Thanks for your time and other ideas are welcomed.
Adding to JIm’s information, Atlas has a nice ACF Pressureaide covered hopper. It appears to be fairly faithful to the prototype. And that would be in sharp contrast to the Athearn’s CF2970 Center Flow in demonstrator paint that has a stencil stating car equipped with butterfly outlets yet actually having a plain gravity version. But as this is readable only with a magnifying glass, I make all guests check theirs at the door.
While a lot of the PD cars used fluidized outlets, as Jim stated, their pans incorporated a layer of wire cloth, the Pressureaide cars took it one step further. I recall some cars also had fluidized slope sheets (transparent from outside the car).
Note that fluidized outlets and PD cars were used in other services where the angle of repose of the commodity was problematic.
Just curious - what are you trying to do? What is your main goal?
Is it
a) to have several industries on your layout that uses covered hoppers?
b) to model both the source and the destination for a car on your visible layout? or
c) something else?
There is no problem having several industries that accept covered hoppers on the same layout, in the same town - you can have loaded grain hoppers arrive on the layout from staging, with some going to grain merchant storage elevator, some going to a flour mill, some going to a brewery, some going to a dock terminal for transloading to barges and so on and so forth.
In all these cases grain would typically be unloaded through the bottom of the hopper into an under track unloading pit, under a roof protecting the grain from the elements, with the grain being moved from that unloading pit into some form of storage bin until it is used, or directly on a conveyor belt into a barge or some such thing.
Another possible destination for grain hopper car can be an interchange track - where one railroad leaves cars that later “will be picked up by another railroad”. Whether you actually later will have another train pick up the cars is not important right then and there.
What is harder to model convincingly is “picking up this car from industry A and dropping it off at industry B just a few yards down the track”.
I would in general recommend modeling several destination industries, and have the cars initially come from staging (representing a source far away - far enough to warrant rail freight), rather than trying to model both original car source and final car dest
Stein, what I am try to do is come up for a reason for there to be a rail road. I am sure you and others understand. I am all so trying to get interested in op’s and switching. I want to see what I am missing. Picking up two hoppers, moving two empty ones from the spur to the elevator and dropping off two more is fun. I just try to take it to the next step.
With the rails I have and route I would take, it is about 200 feet or 3.34 scale miles.
I agree with several of the posters here that it is usually more realistic modeling a railroad transportation system on a layout when both the origination and source of a particular load are not modeled on the layout. However, there are some very realistic and operationally useful exceptions such as:
Icing operations: Ice the car, send to packing/loading industry, re-ice the car, and then send to an off-layout location. (Off-layout meaning industry isn’t modeled, but car is from/too staging or interchange track, or perhaps a yard, imagining the car had been delivered from or sent too an off-layout location.)
Clean-out and repair operations: Deliver car to industry from an off-layout location, pick-up unloaded car and take to a cleaning track or repair track (usually located in a yard) when necessary.
mmmm–I’m kind of doing the operations thing on Eric’s layout. Because we are a granger route most of our operations take place in the picking up and dropping off of hoppers and such at the numerous elevators on that route. Most of, but not all, of the traffic is taken off site through interchanges and the like. There are two furniture plants that require constant work here as well
Another factor I’ve fallen over is the idea of a “high season”. Then, the traffic triples and you have a few challenges along the way. This all done on a “dark territory” route----
The question is whether you think of your layout as representing an entire national or regional railroad system, or whether you think of your layout as representing just one small part (or a few small parts) of a bigger railroad system.
This is where staging come into play. It represents “the rest of the world”. An example:
One day (one operating session) one train picks up loaded grain cars from your elevator and spots new empties by your elevator. Hopefully 5 or 10 grain cars, rather than two.
The train brings those cars picked up along on it’s local route until the cars either gets spotted at a local yard or at an interchange spur elsewhere, where they later will be picked up by another train, or until the train leaves the visible layout to drive into staging (representing a train in transit to somewhere else). End of story for train one
Later the same session (or the next operating session) another train arrives (from staging) in the grain consuming region with loaded grain cars, and delivers them to the flour mill, picking up emptied grain cars from the flour mill. The emptied grain cars get taken to the local yard.
A yard switcher takes the new empty grain cars, spots them on a cleanout track, and then takes the cars that were spotted for cleaning yesterday back to the yard.
A fourth train later takes empty and cleaned grain cars (and other outbound cars) from the local yard and starts on the journey back towards the grain producing region - driving from the yard into staging.
Next operating session, the whole thing starts over again - new e
