I’m new to the operational side of model railroading. But since even my 2-year-old seems to get bored with our round-the-loop layout, I’m thinking that when I upgrade our layout I’d like to add some industries. I’m hoping to put two or even three that would be related, creating the need for purposeful runs. I’ve thought of timber/saw mill/paper plant or ore mining/steel mill. Any other suggestions? I want it to provide lots of fun as the kids get old enough to operate it themselves.
There are a couple of ways to do industries. One is to model industries on your layout as complementary: on one side of the layout is a coal mine, on the other side a coal-fired electric plant, or on one side is a logging camp, with a lumber mill at the other end. This idea has many possible iterations: stockyard/slaughterhouse, farms & silos/grain mills, etcetera. Sometimes you can model industries without needing to build an industry, like a team track (basically a place with a ramp where railroad cars can be loaded and unloaded onto trucks) or interchanges (where one railroad hands off cars to another railroad.)
There are much more sophisticated operating schemes, involving car cards and other printed forms to more closely model the ways that railroads carry goods in the real world. Probably a bit much for your 2 year old.
I’d recommend looking around for some of the old Tyco operating accessories kits, that include things like a tractor that pushes pipe onto flatcars, or work up other items sturdy enough to allow your kids to do some “loading” and “unloading” of their own. As I recall, scooting tractor trailers up a ramp onto flatcars to simulate “piggyback” operations was pretty fun when I was a kid–I needed no DCC to provide adequate truck sounds! “mrrrrr…vroom!” Other things like gondola cars, unloading toy “junk” into a scrapyard, or lengths of pipe [soda straws] or other things that fit in a gon, are well-suited for a layout that includes a level of kids’ play.
That’s definitely what I’m going for – something where they can load and unload and have a reason for running the trains. I like your piggyback and interchange ideas. It makes me realize the indsutry could even be a little abstract, just moving things from A to B. Right now the little guy is loading and unloading dry ziti in and out of a gondola. The next step is finding a place for the ziti to go…