This is something Peter Jones might like to model, or one of the guru’s followers; not much in the way of plants, though, except for industrial plants.
Brick Factory Railway most have never seen
Visited the Glen-Gery brick company capital region factory in Manassas, Virginia yesterday evening. A supervisor gave me a quick tour of the plant and I took photos with my cheapy Coolpix camera.
At first, I thought the railway inside was narrow gauge but found it to be standard gauge, using, I’m estimating, 25 pound rails. I was covered in red brick dust by the time I completed the tour.
There are several plants, probably 3 football fields in area. There’s a real railway that loads bricks into boxcars (no photos yet) and the plant itself contains probably around 50 tracks. Several of the tracks go perpendicular to the other tracks and I was fascinated to see how the cars change directions. You will see several photos of special transfer cars that do this neat trick. The tracks also extend outside to where bricks are stored in large piles. There are many piles there as brick demand at the moment is low.
The brick cars are pulled by one of 3 means: electric trolley locomotives (complete with trolley poles that pull a wire along a trolley line), cables, and Bobcat.
There is a yard for holding the bricks, tracks that push the cars thru a fiery kiln, holding tracks for them to cool and a completely separate railway for a brick dust reclamation operation that works a trolley on an elevated track. There’s even a RIP (repair in place) yard for repairing broken trolley cars. I’d estimate maybe 200 or more cars but I’d need to do an interview to get better details.
The manager says this plant was opened around 1960, but he seemed fuzzy on details and since it was after hours, he was the only one on duty. He’s been working there 15 years and said he and others might soon get laid off due to slow housing ma