i’m looking for information on different companies that have a railroad that just operates in the confines of the mill property or between 2 separte company locations and what kind of procedures,something where building A ,a produces a product that is used in another process that is done in another building either in the plant property or across town. something besides the steel industry, an industry that uses 50’ boxcars short 2 bay covered hoppers and a few tank cars, and and occasional 54’ covered hopper
A copper smelter complex would have something like this, but would take up a lot of layout space to duplicate.
You could get an idea of the complexity by using Google Earth or similar program to view a smelter complex such as the Ray Mine and Copper Basin Railway in Arizona.
Another possibility would be a logging and sawmill complex with its own railroad.
Not exactly what you requested, in that they don’t move material from one location on the property to another. However, a lot of switching opportunities. Cars include hoppers for coal unloading, box cars for shipping/receiving, tank cars for chemicals, and covered hoppers for ?. Go to the following link, http://www.bing.com/maps/, and type Glatfelter Paper, Spring Grove, Pa into the search box. Then select bird’s eye view and zoom in.
The Feb 81 MR had an article on the Ashley, Drew & Northern which served a paper mill. Pretty much all the traffic you talked about including intra plant traffic. There was a track plan with the article focused 90% on modeling the mill switching. One cool thing about the plant track is it included modeling no-nos like a table top loop of track around the plant.
The Apache Railway in northern Arizona is owned by and serves only a paper mill.
There was an article in Trains Magazine stating that the paper mill and Apache Railway were going to be closed down, but there are ongoing negotiations by some investors to purchase the mill and railroad.
Its not quite a mill but you may want to look into the Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado. They have an extensive private railroad on site (it spans about 5 miles). They use 50’ box cars, Covered Hoppers, coal hoppers and tank cars (for the beer!). They have quite a few buildings on site including the power plant, brewing building, Grain elevators (there are two, one at the brewing complex and one 5 miles down the road for storage), the bottling plant, and a few more internal buildings. There is a daily train in and out of Golden called the beer trains which carries almost exclusively Coors products out and supplies in.