On my great northern plains/southern prairies rr we have more …
Grain elevators
Farm Equipment manufacturers and dealers
Seed and Feed stores
A couple of seed cleaning establishments
A bakery/cakery…
One coal mine
Several grocery outlets that receive shipments from team tracks…
and…
a very odd company called Blue Circle Audio…high end tube amps and speakers.
…but mostly grain elevators and feed/seed here…
I’ve made for my railroad a list
With this list I could make my waybills.
Wolfgang
I came across your webpage before. I was just looking up stuff that I highly if I remember and when I saw your your layout and features blew me away.
A well known midwestern modeler and dealer, Ted Schnepf, has made available excellent copies of “Shipper’s Guides” for a variety of railroads. The C&NW one goes product by product and lists the cities and towns in a given state where the railroad had a history of shipping or receiving that product. The variety is huge and even a quick read would give a model railroader 100 ideas for industries for a layout.
Note that Ted offers “free” access to sample pages.
http://railsunlimited.ribbonrail.com/Books/shippers.html
It has to be recognized that in the era before trucks nearly everything you could imagine was shipped by rail – remember they were only seeking to fill a 36 ft boxcar! Later when trucks were common, but interstate highways were not, the exclusive shipping by rail was reduced. It was really in the 1960s when the variety began to reduce, and in part it was when the railroads stopped offering LCL service because frankly the trucks did a better job with that traffic.
Broad categories such as “food” “appliances” “home furnishings” “raw materials” – all have nearly infinite variety. Even “wood” – we see flats with dimensional lumber but also plywood sheets. Finer woods such as veneer were shipped in boxcars and might still be.
Thinking back to my old home town which was on the C&NW, at one siding alone they received bulk oil, lumber, plastic pellets (for the company that virtually pioneered the plastic bags that dry cleaning comes in – it started as a dry cleaner), raw hides for two tanneries, and raw materials for a pig iron foundry.
The next siding served the huge Bucyrus Erie factory and here they both shipped and received – shipped parts to huge shovels and draglines, but received everything from coal foundry sand, cutting oil, scrap steel for the foundry, fabricated and sheet steel, lumber for patterns and ship
Ah such little imagination.
Asking these open ended questions (what industries do railroads serve? what do boxcars carry?) is like asking to name all the colors.
Start with where you are sitting right now. Look at everything around you in the room. Pretty much at some time or another every single thing in the room, its components, its packaging, its raw materials, its intermediate materials, etc. could have or were moved by rail. Then expand your view to the rest of the rooms in the building, then to the area outside the building and then to the surrounding neighborhood and so on in increasing diameter.
If you can’t come up with a couple thousand products, commodities or industries within a couple minutes, you aren’t trying.
If you are reading this, chances are you are seated at a computer. Computers are hauled by railroads. The computer came in a box. Railroads haul the boxes, they haul the paper the boxes are made from, they haul the wood the paper is made from, they haul the chemicals to process the wood. The computer is made of glass, plastic and metal. Railroads haul the components, they haul glass, they haul the sand and chemicals to make the glass. Railroads haul the plastic parts, they haul the raw plastic, they haul the feedstock chemicals to make the plastic. Railroads haul the machines to dig the sand. Railroads haul the pipe and steel to make the chemical plants and the reactor vessels to make the plastic. Railroads haul the ore to make the copper, the copper to make the wire and the wire itself. Railroads haul the lead to make the solder and the solder itself. The computer is probably sitting on a desk. The desk is probably made of metal, wood and plastic, with the seat maybe having a cloth cover. Railroads haul the furniture itself, they haul the metal, they haul the ores to make the metal, They haul the lo
Apparently young Manning (who physically is 21 years old, according to his profile page) does not think these are examples of rail served industries
Railroads of course are rail served businesses as well. They haul (or hauled) in ballast, sand, diesel or coal, sleepers, rails, spare parts (including e.g wheel sets) and lots of other things. They also haul or hauled away various things - e.g ash from ash pits in the steam era.
While e.g. NASA received space shuttle boosters by train.
There is a wide variety of industries that either currently ships or receives, or in earlier times shipped or received stuff by rail.
The OPSIG industry lists (with their 40 000 or so industries) has been mentioned several times. But just for a single railroad of moderate size - the Green Bay and Western, there exists online directories of about 1500 shippers in 1943 and 1953 at this URL: http://www.greenbayroute.com/industries.htm
It is not very hard to come up with exampl
[quote user=“dknelson”]
A well known midwestern modeler and dealer, Ted Schnepf, has made available excellent copies of “Shipper’s Guides” for a variety of railroads. The C&NW one goes product by product and lists the cities and towns in a given state where the railroad had a history of shipping or receiving that product. The variety is huge and even a quick read would give a model railroader 100 ideas for industries for a layout.
Note that Ted offers “free” access to sample pages.
http://railsunlimited.ribbonrail.com/Books/shippers.html
It has to be recognized that in the era before trucks nearly everything you could imagine was shipped by rail – remember they were only seeking to fill a 36 ft boxcar! Later when trucks were common, but interstate highways were not, the exclusive shipping by rail was reduced. It was really in the 1960s when the variety began to reduce, and in part it was when the railroads stopped offering LCL service because frankly the trucks did a better job with that traffic.
Broad categories such as “food” “appliances” “home furnishings” “raw materials” – all have nearly infinite variety. Even “wood” – we see flats with dimensional lumber but also plywood sheets. Finer woods such as veneer were shipped in boxcars and might still be.
Thinking back to my old home town which was on the C&NW, at one siding alone they received bulk oil, lumber, plastic pellets (for the company that virtually pioneered the plastic bags that dry cleaning comes in – it started as a dry cleaner), raw hides for two tanneries, and raw materials for a pig iron foundry.
The next siding served the huge Bucyrus Erie factory and here they both shipped and received – shipped parts to huge shovels and draglines, but received everything from coal foundry sand, cutting oil, scrap steel for the foundry, fabricated and sheet ste
I know the BNSF has a site that lists various elevators, steel cable mfg’s and such along some of their routes…
Here’s the line up for Slate Creek Industrial lead.
1.Pillsbury batch plant.
2.North American Knitting
3.Krispy Kreme
4.Landstar Elevators.Handles grain and soy beans.
5.Mid-State Grocery Distributor
6 The.J.W.Hopewell Corporation.
7.Allied Reclaim-ships old tires.
8.Distribution Track-4 active receivers.
1.Merrill’s Meat Processing.
2.Roberts Lumber.
3.Wellmans.
4.Ohio Steel Vaults
Ad to that list:
automobile parts manufacturing plant (small, brake parts, etc., or large, auto frames, etc)
produce packing houses (if early enough, ice bunkers for the reefer cars are used here too)
general consignment warehuses (generally, a freight storage and transfer station)
by the way, concrete (or cement) plants do not have to be especially large to be served by rail. There is one local to me that, if selectively compressed, would be quite believable. This plant takes on probably 20 or so covered hoppers (the short ones) per week. They do not take any boxcars, as all cement produced there is bulk. You could, however, maximize the diversity of car types being used by having some product being produced in bulk as well as bagged, thus taking both covered hoppers and boxcars. Walthers makes the Medusa Cement Plant that could be kitbashed and/or added on to, to your liking. That, I think, would be a fun project!
Wow either I saw a video about of some men loading cement or something else. All I do remember is some men loading a boxcar that appear to be either cement or flour to be honest lol.
But like the saying goes, you learn something everyday.
Wow either I saw a video about of some men loading cement or something else. All I do remember is some men loading a boxcar that appear to be either cement or flour to be honest lol.
But like the saying goes, you learn something everyday.
I’ve worked for 3 different manufacturing companies and all three used rail service:
ATK (formerly Thiokol) built the boosters for the Space Shuttle. These were shipped to Kennedy Space Center via rail and the used parts were returned to be refurbished, also via rail.
La-Z-Boy had a rail spur, but I never actually saw any traffic on it. I believe that they did use it at one time or another.
Weather Sheld (window manufacturer) received lumber via rail and we also kept a hopper on our spur to dump waste glass into. About every 6 weeks they’d take the full one and replace it with an empty. That hopper load looked like glitter. They took the waste glass to a glass recycler.
A friend once told me about safety problems involving railcars at Miller Brewing, so that seems like a good choice for an industry served by rail.
Other plants that I’ve seen in industrial parks that used rail service include a rollercoaster manufacturer, Fram filters, Kraft foods, and Wilson Sporting Goods (tennis ball factory).
I’m pretty sure that Bowman Kemp (window well manufacturer) is served by rail - they receive a lot of sheet steel).
I interviewed for a job at Huish Detergents. They make laundry and dish detergents, and they use rail service (I don’t know much more than that; I didn’t get the job).
There was a soda pop plant near the Space Shuttle component refurbishment center that always had corn syrup tank cars on their spur.
Really, it appears that any factory where they ship or receive something that is bulky and/or heavy could be a realistic rail customer.
One thing I haven’t seen modeled yet, applicable to the outskirts of a large present-day city:
Transload facility for municipal garbage, loaded on trains for transport to a distant disposal site.
(The intervening communities don’t like the trains. They’d like a thousand garbage trucks a day even less!)
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Well just a few I’m thinking of for an HO shelf switcher (see “Model a transloading terminal” MR Aug. 2010 VOl. 77 Iss. 8)
distribution warehouse; consumer goods including non-perishable food, furniture, appliances, plywood products, insulation products and other building material products
Bulk liquid transload; chemicals, fuels such as LNG/LPG or ethanol, fertilizers, other food like corn syrup
Bulk dry transload; animal feeds, powdered matierials such as cement, sand, grains, salt, other powdered materials such as pot ash and minerals like calcium or talc
Also possibly thinking of a TOFC ramp, but the limited space I’m using may make this unobtainable and/or unrealistic. I don’t plan on being 110% prototypical, but I do still want to remain realistic.
I also just happened to glance up and notice your truck-train terminal listing, but I still choose to post my ideas.
I take it that the OP decided to either quit the forum or was asked to leave?
He had asked that his account be closed, and it seems someone granted him that request.
-Norris user/moderator