Ty for the correction, I use a firewall from norton and adaware which usually stops popups. And trojans etc.
I apologize if anyone experienced a similar problem, i encourage patience. The site with associated links is worth the hassle.
I will keep looking for the other industires and If I find any that will be good for this thread I will add it here.
Good Luck all.
Lee
Lee,
I do the same thing, and will be carrying it a bit further. I model the CB&Q (Burlington) in a rural location mostly, in 1969. This dictates to a point what type and road name rolling stock I’ll need – mostly Burlington logically. This followed by a fair amount of cars from the railroads I’ll be interchanging with, and then followed by a mix of cars from other roads or parts of the country to round out the through trains, etc. I have been buying rolling stock, then, based on these needs and also influenced by planned industries on the layout, over the past dozen years, but…
…in addition, lets say by way of example, I will be modeling a fertilizer plant. Yeah, they ship out bags of it in boxcars and steel drums, too. No problem there. However, I will need to study and find out what raw materials they use to in the production of their finished product. Then I need to find out what type of car that material would be shipped in, AND I want to take it a step further to find out WHERE in the country (or Canada or Mexico, too, if applicable) the material came from, AND then learn what railroad serves that area. This will then determine what type cars AND what road(s) I have yet to purchase to round out my rolling stock needs. May be tedious to some, but lots of fun to me.
Hope this is helpful to you.
Take care,
I got a lot at my local library looking at bound volumes of “Business Week” from the 1950s. Some from the articles but mostly from the ads.
A.E.Staley (tankcar model by Intermountain) of Decatur, Illinois shipped custom-engineered STARCH to kraft paper mills for stiffening corrugated cardboard.
Armstrong Cork manufactured adhesives used to bond layers of plywood.
Swift & Co. received whale oil offloaded from a ship to tankcar (GATX ad)
Stauffer Chemical had a plant in Houston area for regenerating “spent” sulphuric acid used in refining process, had a fleet of tankcars for two way shipments- “water-white” clean acid to refineries and “spent” acid back to regenerating plant.
Hooker Chemical caustic & chlorine used in pulping for paper industry.
Article that Gulf Oil shipped anhydrous ammonia from Texas coast refinery to Spencer chemical in Kansas city MO for refrigeration to generate dry ice. (I knew from a Santa Fe refrigerator car book that Spencer shipped dry ice from KCMO to Galveston Texas area in special dry ice cars, apparently for use in seafood shipping. The Santa Fe book has pix of the dry ice cars.)
All back in the “transition era” of my railroad. Lot of ideas if you are willing to leaf through thousands of pages of magazine.
Thank you for the wonderful thoughts, I have another industry to add to the thread.
I recently bought some Jaeger loads for flats and gons. These are wooden wheels with cabeling, coils of wire, telephone poles and Heavy lumber. I also will be using Chooch’s new Oil rig gondola pipe/supply load as a sort of a fill-in as a “natural gas” supply rack.
I suppose a team track with a walthers over head, and another track with a simple dockside ramp with a small fence to secure the office and grounds particturly the very large transformer that is being loaded by a rented crane on another siding.
Some substation infrastructure, coal, oil, propane and electric company trucks and workmen will fill out the scene. Operation probably will be simple, Gons, flats, and a occasional boxcar with tools, vehicle and transformer oil etc would work well here. One could deliver consumeables (oil, coal or propane) by truck or rail as homes in the 50’s used all three for heat, hot water etc.(not all at once, the utility bills would be astronomical)
Just a new industry for your line to maintain your electric, gas and telecommunications. Hope you like it.
Lee
In your original inquiry you mentioned loading maple syrup. Having lived all my life in syrup-producing areas, I have to say that I’ve never seen a maple sugar bush with rail service (Pity - narrow gauge steam would seem ideally suited). However, for the “season” (6-8 weeks), a nearby team track could be kept quite busy with boxcars of empty cans, jugs and bottles inbound, to be filled with the luscious syrup and then shipped out again. A big maple sugar bush might fill a couple of boxcars a week - and since these tend to be clustered in appropriate forest areas, and often work cooperatively, they might share a team track and together ship a boxcar load a day. An interesting occasional load might be new evaporator equipment - every few years, these need replaced or upgraded, and the big ones would definitely need a flat car with a tarp over them, or a double door boxcar.
Due to happenstance (I got a lot of reefers and stock cars) early on during layout-planning, I decided to have a food-heavy industry mix. One major customer will be a food warehouser. Another major customer is a packing plant. (Era: 1900) Steers gotta eat, and everything they don’t make into food has to be hauled away. (Manure, too.) For the grocery, I walked through a modern mega-store and took notes on general food types. I am going to have a Campbell’s Soup boxcar. Most fresh food will come in reefers or ventilated boxcars. I don’t have room for a dairy, but that could have a milk car every morning. It does not hurt that Ball Jars is just downstate from me; the brewery can get its bottles in a billboard boxcar. Since I have small children in the house, one feature for me is to have a variety of colorful cars to draw attention and interest and small fingers away from fragile things like HO-scale railings or weathered buildings.
If you can find a book titled A Sampling of Penn Central, the author discusses many industries in KY, VW, OH, IN, IL and how many carloads they generated per year. This may help you get a start on something.
The book can be found at the Allen County Public Library (Ft Wayne IN) if you don’t have a copy locally. ACPL does inter-library loans.