Modeling a Flour Mill

Model Railroader Prototype information for the modeler
1

Hello,

I’m planning an n-scale layout on the approximate dimentions of a hollow core door, and thinking about having a flour mill serve as the focal industry of the layout. The layout it set in the late 60s/early 70s in the upper midwest. While the Model Railroader’s Guide to Grain was a great help, I have a couple questions about rolling stock and adapting track arrangements to fit the space.

  1. When did privately owned flour airslide hoppers start becoming a Thing? While the colorful Canada cars weren’t really seen south of the border in the 70s, I’m not as sure about the privately owned airslide coverered hoppers (the ones with Pillsbury, International Multifoods, etc on the sides). The Guide to Grain book just has them appearing sometime during the 70s, and the transition from RR owned, to private ownership, to private ownership with ‘billboard’ sides not really being noted.

  2. For hauling food-grade products, like bagged flour, were any sort of clean and well maintained boxcars useable (for the 70s, modern 50’ plug door boxcars), or did they have to be specialty flour boxcars that were captive for that service?

  3. In this time period, how common would covered hoppers be in doing delivery to good-sized flour mills? Or were covered hoppers at this time found almost exclusively in moving grain from inland terminals to port terminals?

  4. Are grain boxcars and grain hoppers able to use the same unloading facilities? If not, would a good size flour mill in this period be equipped to take in grain from both car types?

  5. For loading flour, would airslide hoppers and boxcars be loaded from the same area, or would they be loaded from different areas of the mill?

  6. Any ideas on adapting flour mill trackage to the limits of an HCD? Most mills I’ve noted in real life tend to be very long and thin, which is a problem as it takes either a lot of space to get back to the mill from the main l

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  1. Privately owned (or more common, leased) Airslides would be common from the time they started in the 1950’s. That way, the shipper could be sure their car hadn’t been contaminated by being used for a non-food load, and that it would be there for their use - they wouldn’t have to rely on the railroad to provide railroad-owned cars.

  2. Into the 1970s grain trains were primarily made up of 40’ boxcars, often older ones and not terribly well maintained externally. “Grain doors” could be nailed inside of the sliding doors to allow the cars to be filled with grain. Usually the grain doors went only part way up the door height, so the car could be filled via a spout or hose.

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Probably only plug door boxcars would be used for shipping bagged flour.

4

Cars for flour loading would typically be restricted to clean lading only, and would often carry AAR classification XF. These could be more or less typical in appearance otherwise, although they could carry stenciling for dedicated service.

MP 114398 by wp8thsub, on Flickr

One example of a flour car of the time is shown above, a type used by the MoPac and Norfolk & Western. These were converted from ice bunker refrigerators. I kitbashed mine from an ice reefer as well.

The examples here had different sides compared to the one I modeled, but note the stencils for flour loading http://rr-fallenflags.org/mp/mp-frt.htm , http://rr-fallenflags.org/nw/nw-frt.htm .

DSC03576 by wp8thsub, on Flickr

I have a flour mill as one of the larger industries on my layout. Given my available space, I modeled it in shallow relief against the backdrop, and represented only the tracks loading Airslide hoppers. The prototype has additional tracks on the opposite side of the structures shown that could be

5

In reply to your post, I offer the following

The General American 2600 cu. ft. “Airslide” covered hopper made its debut in 1953 with five cars, GACX 42000-42004. In 1954, in addition to railroads, companies such as Penick & Ford, International Milling, Pillsbury and, Ross began leasing “Airslides”. Each year saw cars being leased to a who’s who of millers, such as NE Consolidated Mills, Centennial Mills, Conagra, Quaker Oats, Clinton Corn Products, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), A.E. Staley, Flour Mills of America, Elkhart Milling, Amber Milling, Liberty Milling, Cargill, Tennant and Hoyt, Golden Loaf, General Mills, Bay State Milling, Red Wing Milling-on and on, and on.

As you have already noted, a clean, tight box car is preferred for the transportation of bagged flour, even today. Many cars used to haul bagged flour had special weevil repellant linings and were so marked to restrict them to flour loading only. The extensive fleet of 40 footers owned by the Buffalo Creek Railroad of Buffalo NY featured a bag of flour in their herald and they were quite common in the east. Most of the cars I saw in bagged flour service were 40 foot, sliding door cars although, the Santa Fe had a large number of 40 footers with plug doors that also had grain loading doors built in, in their Bx-85 class.

Covered hoppers became more prominent when their cubic capacity allowed full use of their abililty to carry 70 tons vs. 50 tons in a boxcar. One of the pioneering covered hoppers was the Pullman-Standard 2893 cu. ft., PS-2 triple hopper, introduced in 1954, which launched a family of cars culminating in the 4750 cu. ft. PS-2CD as offered in HO by Tangent and, Intermountain. Something like 14,000 PS-2CDs were built, starting around 1974. As shippers and railroads began to enjoy the efficiency of moving more grain in fewer cars, the covered hopper shouldered t

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Starting maybe in the late 1950’s, some Midwestern railroads did have 40’ plug-door boxcars with small grain doors built into the top of the plug door, so the cars could be loaded with grain without opening the door. Athearn has made an HO version of the car.

http://www.athearn.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=RND1015

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U of M Model Railroad club has some info on Nokomis Mill:

http://rrclub.umn.edu/model-railroad-ideas/switching-tight-places

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Athearn’s HO scale “grain car” is a fairly accurate model of Union Pacific’s BF-50-2 class boxcars. The only departure from prototype is the use of 5/5 dreadnaught ends instead of 1-3-4 improved dreadnaughts.

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Apologies if I mess up the multiquote, thanks for the responses everyone!

Google search isn’t turning up any specific flour loading boxcars for Great Northern, even though they served the big mills in Minneapolis. Was the stenciling a thing only some roads did?

[quote user=“NHTX”]
Your question about loading/unloading facilities prompts me to refer you to an excellent soft cover book published by the Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modeling Society. “The Santa Fe and Grain Story” covers in depth, every aspect of the grain industry served by a railroad synonimous with America’s bread basket. This book has the answer to every question you might ask about the history of grain as it relates to railroading, including the elevators and the mills, as well as the cars and their development. Your questions about track arrangements may be answered by the many track diagrams of facilities taken from Santa Fe Car Location and Inventory Control (CLIC) books which are used by the crews of the trains that serve these industries. These diagrams not only show the tracks but, also the car spots, location of chutes and spouts or, pits, as well as which tracks are for hoppers or Airslides, and other restrictions. If you have an interest in railroads and grain, if you don’t buy any other book, get this one. The particulars are: ISBN 978-1-933587-36-3 at,

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Yes. There may have been assigned service cars without any visible identification. Perhaps there’s information on such things from a historical society or model forum dedicated to the GN.

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Ajidica,

Your question about flour loading boxcars on the Great Northern gives one the impression the GN is of interest to you. To answer your question, I consulted the book “Great Northern Equipment Color Pictorial Book One: Boxcars and Stock Cars”, by Scott R. Thompson, ISBN 1-885614-03-9. The all color book by Four Ways West Publications covers GN’s boxcars and stockcars by road number, including express boxcars and rebuilds right up to the BN merger.

GN fielded two groups of 40 foot boxcars, rebuilt in the late 1960s. These cars were in the 6700-6924 and 4400-4699 series. All were rebuilt from older cars and, delivered in the Big Sky Blue paint scheme. The ten foot wide plug doors had grain loading doors built into them for bulk grain loading, in addition to forest product loading, when they weren’t busy hauling grain. The 4400-4699 series cars were exterior post cars that utilized the 5/5 corrugation, early dreadnought, ends of the original cars. An article on building the exterior post cars appeared in either MR or, RMC, back in the 1970s.

As noted earlier, the 40 foot boxcar lasted well into the covered hopper era on granger railroads because much of the network of grain branches was laid with rail as light as 60 pounds. Remember the Milwaukee’s truncated SDL-39s? Light rail is the reason. The demise of the small elevator in every town and subsequent abandonment of the light rail branches, hastened the disappearance of the 40 foot grain boxcar.

Your question about how long GN locos could be expected to retain their GN paint after the BN merger has no definite time constraint. Some factors that may enter into the equation are, size of the fleet involved and, those locomotives the new entity expects to retain and those it intends to quickly dispose of. Painting a locomotive that is soon going to join th

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Growing up in the Twin Cities during the '70s it was not uncommon to see GN and NP locos but BN repainted fairly quickly.

There’s a Railpictures Gallery of the “Rainbow” years:

https://www.railpictures.net/album/5464/

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I came across your post while doing a search related to ATSF flour boxcars. I worked Cargill Flour Milling 17 yrs (even wrote a book about it). While no two mills are the same, here is a quick look at my former infrastructure. My mill did both sacked & bulk. All loadings were on a single track inside the warehouse. Not on the entire track, but some “spots” were able to load both boxes and airslides. Just about type of box would be used for sacked loading. The highest business consisted of export sales in 50 ft cars that held 1,350 bags @ 110 lbs each. Airslides and the larger PD hoppers were used for domestic bulk bakery flour. There were nine spots on the load track to load cars. Hope this helps and best of luck w/your project

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You need a couple of these

BCK History & Locomotives (trainweb.org)

You might want to invest in these

The Buffalo Creek Railroad – Erie Lackawanna Railroad Historical Society (erielackhs.org)

Buffalo Creek Railroad Vol 2 1950 And Beyond – Erie Lackawanna Railroad Historical Society (erielackhs.org)

In 1868, the Buffalo Creek Railroad was incorporated as the first terminal railroad in the United States. Designed to tap into the growing grain milling business and Lake Erie commercial traffic, this five-mile railroad, concentrated entirely in Buffalo, New York, became the busiest terminal railroad of its size by the early 20th century. Even though the railroad’s service became synonymous with Buffalo’s grain milling and flour industry, it also served a significant amount of the chemical and oil business in the area. The railroad began to dieselize in the 1930s, completing the process in 1948. It was an all-ALCo road after 1956.

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As mentioned, many diesels were sort of ‘patched out’ with a small “BN” and their new BN number on the side of the cab, with the rest of the engine staying as is. Just going by memory, I’d say most pre-BN engines had been repainted or retired by about 1976. You might see one here or there after that, but it would be mostly BN green by then.

FWIW freight cars lasted much longer. A BN grain train in the late 1970s would have a fair number of GN, NP, and CB&Q cars in it. I have photos I took of GN “Big Sky Blue” cars still running in their original paint and reporting marks in the early 1990s.