I’m new to rail modeling and hope to model the northern Midwest (Wisconsin-Minnesota area) around the 1930s-40s or so era. (I’m not totally fixed on that, either location or era.) I’m planning on going with N scale and have a mid-sized empty spare bedroom available, fortunately my better half has already signed off and given me her blessing. My primary question has to do with figuring out how many car loads per day/week is a reasonable number for the industries. Does anyone know any place that covers this? Along with that comes the related question of which industries to model. Of course, timber and agriculture seem like obvious choices. I’d like to perhaps fudge a bit and set up a milk route, or even shift the route over more to the northeast.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions anyone might have about this or likely future questions.
The standard freight cars (box cars, flat cars, gondolas) of the 1930s and 1940s were 40 foot cars. There is no hard and fast rule on this, and frankly most model railroaders have structures on their layouts that would struggle to contain the contents of one 40’ boxcar! Of course no rule says the entire industry that you are serving has to be modeled on your layout.
My own feeling is taht for a fairly small layout, it makes sense to have a nice variety of industries and devote to them a siding that can handle one car, so that your operating sessions consist of perhaps swapping out an empty for a load. When I was a boy a local furniture (church supper type table of pressed wood covered with formica, folding metal legs) factory would get about a boxcar a week of the pressed wood. The local tannery would get about a boxcar every 4 days or so of stinky untanned hides. On the other hand, the really huge factory that made cranes and shovels got maybe 4 flatcars or gons a day of sheet steel and shipped out an equal number of empties plus maybe four or five loaded flats with shovel parts. The local lumber yard got a flat car or box car of lumber about every 3 or 4 weeks it seemed. But that seems like a lot of lumber to sell (on the other hand lots of houses were being built back then). The local oil distributor and dealer got a tank car (maybe gasoline, maybe heating oil) every few weeks. A factory that converted scrap aluminum to ingots seemed to get cars just about every day it seemed. On the other hand, the local feed and seed dealer – when it got cars at all which was rare by the late 1950s early 1960s – seemed to get maybe one car a year!
These industries had probably not changed their traffic loads since the 1940s.
Kalmbach’s “Industries Along the Tracks 2” has a section on the dairy industry that includes some pictures of the Land O’Lakes plant in Minneapolis in the thirties or forties that you might find interesting.
I try to plan for any industry to be set up to receive at least two 40’ cars, even though sometimes the industry will only get one car. It seems like an industry small enough to just get one car at a time might have been a candidate for being served by truck…plus if you make room for two, you’re likely to give the industry more room, rather than having it shoehorned into a spot unrealistically.
Keep in mind too that businesses in a small town often would be served by going to the local team track. A business that only got one car at a time might not be worth the railroad’s building a separate spur track for it, especially if it got shipments by boxcar or reefer which were easy to transfer to a truck (or wagon).
I am trying something fairly radical in the model railroading community. I am trying to build a full scale model railroad with no selective compression or fast clocks. When done I expect it to appear much more like the real thing. This means fewer but larger industries, training crews to slow down and generally a much slower pace than most modelers run or operate their railroads. Time will tell if it successful. I think the ultimate of this concept was the railroad featured in Great Model railroads (or something like that) of the Kansas City area in the second floor of a framhouse that just transferred cars between railroads. Much more relaxed. Everything run as extras and no timetables to speak of. You are going to need about 25-30 actual feet of mainline for one mile of track in N gauge. A medium size bedroom at 12’ x 12’ allows roughly 36’ on three walls. You could do the same thing I am by picking a railroad oriented town possibly one of the port towns (Manitowoc comes to mine) for transferring cars to a lake ferry for Michigan allowing variety. You could pick a town like Wasau or Stevens Point that had fairly large reliance on trains or you could freelance a town. I think coal roads and in the upper midwest ore railroads are to restricting in the type cars they run and would avoid that urge.
That idea - modelling one town or location on a fairly large layout - is relatively common in the UK I guess. I have a video of a layout called “Torbay” which just models the city of Torbay, where two railroads had a major junction / interchange before nationalisation. The layout was built to take to shows as a display layout, but when set up is something like 12’ by 22’.
To quote E.L.Moore, “Turn Backward, O Time…” There was time when everything - and I mean everything that wasn’t produced within the town itself - came by rail, or if small enough or close enough, by wagon. And that time was as recent as 100 years ago. Study the Sanborn maps and other documents of the era and one can see that there were many small rail-served industries, especially outside the big cities. Railroads could justify grading roadbed and laying track for as little as one paying train a day. As inefficient as these little lines were, they sure beat the alternatives before trucks and government built roads became prevalent.
A surprisingly (to me) common track plan in these small towns in the 19th Centruy was a passing siding serving multiple small industries/customers.
Buildings were relatively expensive (as were most tools and infrastructure) and so tended to be smaller than the same purpose would use in later times.
Rail car capacities increased in the 19th Century from 10 tons to 25 tons or so.
Such track arrangements were very common in the twentieth century too. Oh, and they weren’t passing sidings where trains would regularly meet. Those are double-ended spurs. They were convenient because trains could switch the industries from either direction.
I don’t know about that. The owner gives the crews “secret” envelopes that ascribe a “personality” to the crews. My crew, who was to take their own sweet time about everything, almost got in a fistfight with another crew, that was driven to get the job done as quickly as possible, over who was going to get occupancy of a key interlocking.
I also don’t think you want fewer, large industries if you are building things near real scale, you really want fewer, small industries. If you actually measure the footprint of a 'small" industry and model it ful size it will look like a huge industry. An industry with 2 or 3 spots can be 4-6 feet long if you model without compression.
I guess a little more input is required. I am attemptimg to model one mile around North Philadelphia Station and all the buildings are brick and six stories or more including General Eelectric, Philco Radio, Cuneo press (Time, Saturday Evening post and others weekly) North American Lace Co., A&P food warehouse for Philly. All large buildings filling the block in which they reside along with several others. Small town - totaly different set of buildings…