Near me there is a small railroad/company that repairs freight cars for other customers (privately and shortline-owned). They don’t have a building (yet), so they do the work on their line at a runaround track, with the assistance of some forklifts, scissors lifts and work trucks.
Mostly minor stuff: wheel work, busted boxcar doors, blown out ends, etc but they get just about any type of car.
Lots of cool ideas, enough it seems to write “Industries By The Tracks” 5, 6, and 7.
The Plastic industry keeps coming up in various guises, and that would be need - was it started with Bakelite in the 1910s? What did they ship that in, how did they process it? What about Nylon in the 1930s (which ties into the Textile industry by the 1940s, as well as the Military Industrial Complex). The destinations are interesting, but I’d also like to see the originating plants too - and were plastic pellets always shipped in covered hoppers as a rule? What about those big storage/sorting yards down South - open air “warehouses” of product in parked covered hoppers. They could get a whole book of this, let alone a 10-page overview.
Sorry Gsrrman, Quarries were covered rather well in Volume 4 (he included both aggregates in hoppers and marble slabs on flatcars too).
Also sorry VSmith - Team Tracks and Transloads were covered in Volume 3, LCL was in Volume 2.
But this:
Maybe Philip Goldstein can be convinced to consolidate his Industrial & Offline Terminal Railroads of Brooklyn, Queesn, Staten Island, Bronx, and Manhattan into a book, including some Jersey side info too.
One that I am planning for my branch line would be a winery. In my case, it would be a small operation but would need raw materials for making the wine (except the grapes which would be grown on site) and bottling it (glass bottles, cardboard).
A cannery would be a very good industry to model, in looking at the cars that were routed to the Campbell’s soup factory in Napoleon, OH they received box cars, RBL’s, Mechanical Refrigerator’s, Hoppers, Covered Hoppers. They mostly shiped product out in loader equipped RBL’s or insulated Boxcars (XLI).
Rick J
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In conjunction with that, Cement manufacture. Limestone, and other goods in, coal loads to fire the kiln, and covered hoppers full of Portland Cement out.
You can not only model the limestone quarries along with the coal mines, but have the plant at another location, and since a lot of Portland Cement is exported, a dockside facility to handle ship loading elsewhere!
Frito Lay gets covered hoppers of Potatos here everyday.
About that ‘universal industry.’
Not a real world situation, but one that can be modeled. Siding vanishes behind a hill (where it might become a multi-track hidden yard.) The hill is tall enough to hide the tracks, but not the tall smokestack and/or industrial-type water tank - which bear either (Fillintheblank) Industrial Park or (Unameit) Inc. in lettering appropriate to the era. If you get a new car, come up with a new product (anything from medicine vials to cabin cruisers.)
Total layout space, minimal. Potentialities, endless.
So, do I have one? Nope. My layout is set in a rural area where people either cut down trees or mine coal. All those carloads of everything else are just passing through.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Here’s another industry I plum forgot…A company that makes steel blades for bulldozers,graders and pans(earthmover’s).In would be steel of course and out could be scrap and blades…How about a company that makes assembled truck trailer axles? In would be steel.
Place in central PA along the Buffalo line makes railroad ties. I think they take in old used ties in gons, and ship out fresh smelly creosote ties. Might even ship green ties to our neighbours in the north.
Old ties can be shipped in using gons, re-purposed woodchip hoppers, and coal cars.
Yes please!, I know that site well, If he did I’d buy two![:D]
There is (or was) a mill on the Fraser river up here. They would haul the logs out of the river that were brought in from up the coast in log booms. They put out telephone poles and railroad ties. Lots of rail cars leaving with finished product from there.
Earlier I mentioned Southeasternh Container Corp that makes plasitic soda bottles over looking a much bigger operation in my area.
That is TREX ,maker of construction lumber for decks etc. Both the raw material, plastic for recycling, and the finished product are hauled by rail.
http://www.trex.com/?gclid=COK3wYnfmrYCFalxOgod6TUATA
Bob
I always thought the business below would be good for a model rr. It’s a used-brick yard. All you’d need is a spur and a loading ramp. And lots of bricks. Note the two old wooden boxcars for storage.
Steve S
A railroad car manufacturer/repair center. Take your choice of what kinds of cars. Imagine the loads in vs loads out?
A USED brickyard? Is that where they recycle bricks into, I don’t know, aggregates or pebbles or something? What do they do there?
Also, I can’t really make it out, but is there a grey steel boxcar with a rusted roof.in the yard? If so, is it in revenue service, or just more storage?
The fanning out of the tracks looks pretty cool, too bad a lot of them look unused…
My guess used bricks are like used timbers – cleaned up and resold to architects as high priced decorator items. A lot of the old mills that got taken down were recycled into the high end architecture industry.
I live in a part of town with really, really strict regulations about the “look” of buildings (and sometimes…crazy regulations. One building is earmarked for demolition because its design doesn’t fit the style of a 19th century warehouse, despite literally being a warehouse built in the 19th century…?). If you need some 19th century bricks for your building you’re renovating, well, used 19th century bricks are your only option!
There is a used brickyard on Milwaukee’s south side and for a time it was rail served (boxcars) by the C&NW taking out loads of bricks on pallets. Milwaukee is sometimes called the Cream City because of the cream brick that was made here in the 19th century, which when cleaned up is a light yellowish color due to the clays used. There is as noted above a considerable market for “heritage” brick and evidently it is worth the cost of cleaning off the mortar and being careful enough in a demolition to perserve the brick.
I believe the siding has since been removed but it is not that long ago that it was indeed a rail customer.
The brick business in general is an interesting one and worth of attention. Those who go to Galesburg IL for the annual railroad days might find themselves railfanning at East Galesburg on the former Santa Fe (now BNSF of course) and the remains of the old Purington brick factory, once the world’s largest, can still be seen in the woods. While directly on the Santa Fe (and old photos show that it was rail served by the ATSF) the primary rail service was by the CB&Q, via a spur line that came off the line that goes from Galesburg to Peoria. You can still see traces of the ROW off of Grand Ave in Galesburg heading towards the Santa Fe.
Dave Nelson
Used brick still is big business out here, they just demolished an old brick building across from my work, and yep, they took it down brick by brick, palletized them and shipped them off. Brick out here is mostly just thin veneer brick as the seismic codes prevent traditional masonry construction so most pricey antique bricks demo’ed here gets shipped, by rail, to cities east of the rockies.
How about a locomotive builder? After all, they depended on the railroads as much as anyone else.