Now let me bounce an idea off of you. How about, the trains run out in the sticks and haul the wood back to the sawmill, the cut lumber to a furniture factory, and the woodchips off to the paper mill (or whereever), and the trucks haul the finished furniture off to the stores? I mean, you COULD haul furniture by rail to a furniture warehouse, but what if your furniture company does direct-to-store distribution? Not every store would have rail service, and doing distributions this way by rail is rather inefficient anyway.
I had an idea where a lumber company owned like 100,000 acres (tax free years ago, and grandfathered under some bureaucratic rules), and the have tracks to haul the timber out, and they replant and manage the woods so they can get nice, straight lumber. The mill saws the logs into lumber, and ship out the woodchips to their own waferboard plant. The sawdust goes on to the particle board plant. They ship out finished lumber, plywood and paneling, waferboard (called OSB today), and particleboard. There’s no reason they couldn’t ship out to a furniture plant (though mine could go to a relatively new “mobile home” company).
I like the paint schemes, but personally I would NOT go with a very dark PRR green, I would use the green your artwork shows. That is a fair representation of a color available on road trailers today. I would paint the handrails on the engines a nice contrastiong color (as required by FRA rules, if you’re into that sort of thing) as well as for the safety or your “crews”, maybe white or yellow. Dark handrails on a dark engine sort of “disappear” at night.
Brad