What types of industries would use different cars? I read that some grain cars will use hoppers (grain, wheat, etc) and tanks for ammonnia. Any others? If, so what type of cars for the industries?
Someone suggested that I have a large industry on my layout w/ different types of cars than a lot of small ones serviced by only one type of rolling stock.
TIA!
Lee
Trun of the century chemical plant. Coal in, Coke out (hoppers), with petroleum tankers, chemical tankers and box cars in and out.
Do you want a loads-in, loads out sort of industry, like a plastics extruder (to name a small industry) which takes in cover hopper loads of pellets, and may send out extruded items in boxcars (I stress may, since small batches of lightweight items would probably be sent by truck)? Also paper or pulpwood in, cardboard boxes out… wood in, furniture out (heck, that was one of the main play points of Railroad Tycoon II - for example you’d haul fruit & steel into a cannery, and haul canned fruit as food out to the cities…the best one was an Automobile plant, haul in Steel, and Tires, haul out filled autoracks to the cities and make mad profit!).
Or do you mean industries which take various loads in various cars in (everyone’s favorite, a basic steel mill brings in coal (or coke), iron ore, various other alloys, and ships out steel?
Era?
Part of the country?
They can make a tremendous difference in the answer. If you are modeling 1890, then a coal mine would give you vitrually every trype of car other than a tank car. If you are modeling 1990 then a coal mine would only use one or two types of cars.
Dave H.
I had once thought of a Jiffy-Pop pop corn company. Finished product out in boxcars.
Incoming would be: Aluminum or aluminum foil, paper / card stock, corn, salt, butter, wire, and maybe some things that I have forgot. If they printed their own packaging, maybe another building for this process.
I also though about a Craker-Jack plant. This would be another with a lot of different things coming in.
Instead of one mega industry building, I built several smaller shops and use trucking to transfer all the materials between the production and shipping areas. Unload a boxcar in one spot, move it to shipping and load it with finished product.
kk:
A lot of steam-era industries (sometimes it seems like nearly ALL steam-era industries) received hopper cars of coal, besides whatever cars they received raw material and shipped product in. It’s hard for us, today, to realize just how much coal was directly used by industry back then, for heating, process steam, and power generation. Coal was often the greatest rail-shipped input for many factories.
A few sample industries:
Foundry:
Receiving:
-Hoppers of coke to run furnaces
-Gondolas of pig iron and scrap
-Hoppers (?) of limestone (gons?)
Shipping:
-Boxcars of small castings, flats or gons of large castings
-Gondolas of slag (if not dumped locally)
Condensed milk plant:
Receiving:
-Milk cars of milk, in special trains (you could build a model RR around the milk business)
-Hoppers of coal for steam generation
-Boxcars (or gons? Not sure) of tin plate to make cans
Shipping:
-Boxcars (insulated?) of canned condensed milk
-Gondola cars of shiny or rusted scrap tinplate
-Gondola cars of coal ash (if not dumped locally)
Slaughterhouse:
-Receives stock cars of livestock
Ships:
-Meat reefers of beef sides, dressed pork, etc.
-Boxcars of hides
-Gondola cars of ‘tankage’ (by all accounts, eugh)
-Tank cars of ‘tankage’
(“Tankage” or offal would go to a rendering plant and be recycled into glues, industrial oils, soap, fertilizers, etc. Every part but the squeal…)
(The slau
You might also try a brewery, there’s a great article in the “Classic Railroads you can model” But it can takes up a lot of space
How about this one out of left field: a university. Before the 60s, they got a lot of stuff by rail in a lot of places in this country. They devoured every kind of resource you can imagine. You only need a few relatively small buildings too. A food service building that would get boxcars and reefers of everything ravenous students would consume. A general stores building that got boxcar after boxcar of everything thats not food. Near there would be a team track of sorts where they could unload bulk goods or huge things like gravel and structural steel and brick for construction projects. And a coal dock for the campus power plant, which had an even bigger appetite for coal than students for beer. For comparison, in 1957 the Bellefonte Central delivered 22 carloads of food to Penn State to feed around 12,000 students. In the same year, they delivered 511 carloads of coal to keep the lights on and cook that food. And finally, there would be the passenger depot, with plenty of seasonal traffic, local traffic, and where the local REA office was most likely located. Like a lot of heavy industries, you just put the rest of campus off-layout.
What’s about a team track ? [:)] [:)] [:)]
Wolfgang
What about an interchange track with another railroad? This is easy to model and you can interchange any type of car appropriate for your era.
What about a team track? Just model a spur and you can spot box cars, flat cars, tank cars, covered hoppers to load and unload products for industries which ship and receive by rail but don’t have their own siding.
I have both of these modeled on my layout.
And, you can do pasenger locakl if so desired. Monon Did it.
The one ‘industry’ that can handle everything from helium tankers to loaded Schnabel cars is an interchange track - and you don’t even need a building!
Then there’s the track that disappears behind a hill, serving a (virtual) industrial park whose various tenants fabricate everything from pocket calculators to 37 foot power cruisers. If you acquire a new car, invent a new tenant.
Just to show how many different KINDS of cars can be sent to the company town at a coal mine which is almost inaccessible to commercial trucks:
Mine supplies unload at the mine’s warehouse, company store items unload at the freight house or team track, motor fuel unloads at the storage tanks, explosives are switched (carefully!) to the magazine.
Just to make life interesting, there is a rather dense passenger schedule to be worked around.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Doodlebugs/RDCs depending on era to take people out on rare vacations. One could also throw in med-evac trains for mine collapses etc.
[quote user=“Autobus Prime”]
kk:
A lot of steam-era industries (sometimes it seems like nearly ALL steam-era industries) received hopper cars of coal, besides whatever cars they received raw material and shipped product in. It’s hard for us, today, to realize just how much coal was directly used by industry back then, for heating, process steam, and power generation. Coal was often the greatest rail-shipped input for many factories.
A few sample industries:
Foundry:
Receiving:
-Hoppers of coke to run furnaces
-Gondolas of pig iron and scrap
-Hoppers (?) of limestone (gons?)
Shipping:
-Boxcars of small castings, flats or gons of large castings
-Gondolas of slag (if not dumped locally)
Condensed milk plant:
Receiving:
-Milk cars of milk, in special trains (you could build a model RR around the milk business)
-Hoppers of coal for steam generation
-Boxcars (or gons? Not sure) of tin plate to make cans
Shipping:
-Boxcars (insulated?) of canned condensed milk
-Gondola cars of shiny or rusted scrap tinplate
-Gondola cars of coal ash (if not dumped locally)
Slaughterhouse:
-Receives stock cars of livestock
Ships:
-Meat reefers of beef sides, dressed pork, etc.
-Boxcars of hides
-Gondola cars of ‘tankage’ (by all accounts, eugh)
-Tank cars of ‘tankage’
(“Tankage” or offal would go to a rendering plant and be recycled into glues, industrial oils, soap, fertilizers, e
You want switching?
**Pulls switchlist for morning plant job:
Pull 8 Loaded Boxcars.
Pull outbound empties.
Start placing inbounds:
2 or three covered hoppers to bulk track. There they unload into silos. (I have different product matrix for different industries)
one or two gondolas to crane track with inbound material.
Coil Covered cars go into coil building to be unloaded.
two boxcars with plant supplies to one building, two more boxcars with different lading to another building. Then when emtpied (Blue flags removed) they are switched to shipping to be loaded.
Chemical cars to the bulk track to transfer acids and other lading to storage tanks.
Furnance oil or pressure gas cars to be unloaded to a fuel truck which takes fuel to another building.
Coal or Fuel oil goes to boiler house to make company steam.
Occasional flatcars for machinery or heavy jobs.
When all the buildings are complete (About two or three under planning/construction) the industry will be able to accomodate whatever you want to do with it. Motor cars? Appliances?
Another thought is the town on the other side of the layout has other industries that support the large employer of HO scale people nearby. News print for newspapers, lumber for the box/crate factory etc.
I estimate 16 cars to be switched in the morning and another in the late afternoon. At the end of the “Workday” there would have been at least 8 loads out and dozens of empties of all kinds going back to be reloaded.
Reefers to go cold storage to keep the workers fed with food.
Up through the Transition Era, any industry which used refrigerator cars, such as breweries, meat-packing plants and produce distributers, also needed to add block ice to the reefers. Here’s an opportunity to model a single type of car, but send them to vastly different destinations. Even “through traffic,” which might not be going to or coming from a destination on your layout, would nevertheless need to pause and be serviced at an icing facility every few hundred miles.
Breweries and packing plants both need rail service for multiple car types, but the finished product requires this additional step before it’s loaded and sent on its way.
Paper mill. Receives pulp wood in bulkhead flats, or gondolas, or old box cars with the roof torched off. Receives chlorine and other chemicals in tankers. Sizing comes in covered hoppers. Coal comes in ordinary hoppers. Heavy machinery comes and goes on flat cars. Finished paper ships out in boxcars. Great traffic generator.
My steel mill receives unit hopper trains of coal for the coke ovens, a few covered hoppers for furnace additives, gondolas full of scrap metal, and boxcars of firebrick; it ships out steel coils on covered coil flatcars and specially-outfitted gons, and benzol (a coke by-product) in tank cars.
Only trouble is, the mill takes up ~50% of my layout’s square footage![:D]
This brewery is inspired by the real one in Van Nuys, CA and is built on a 1’X4’ T-Trak module in N scale.
The real-life brewery receives different types of grain and diatomaceous earth (for filtering) in covered hoppers; beechwood, bottles, canstock and packaging materials in boxcars, CO2 in tankcars, and ships beer in insulated box cars.
This module mates with a companion yard module, much as the real brewery is served from a nearby yard. These can be combined in a couple of configurations.
You can read more about this compact switching layout here.
Larger multi-track industries are usually more realistic than the typical model railroad industries that are not much larger than the boxcars that serve them.
Byron
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